A note about material components: in 5e, there's really no difference between an arcane focus and a bag of material components, You are not intended to track every twig, piece of thread, and bit of charcoal in the bag. You are only supposed to track components that have a gold cost, such as diamonds or expensive inks. The same is true of your arcane focus. So you are hand waving the components either way, the only thing you have to track is components with a material cost.
I did a travel montage for a week in the jungle. Checked in with my players. They'd agreed we didn't want 6 months of real time games to get across a dangerous jungle, but wanted to feel the danger and length of journey. So just for that session, they could only take short rests and not long rests, until the people they were escorting got to the destination. It represented the daily attrition from trying to use resources, getting more worn down by the end of each succesive day. As a concession they could switch put prepared spells on a short rest during the session. Worked even though the week only yielded 3 encounters.
As a player, I hold myself to most of these even if the DM does not require it. I have found ways to use it to cause some shinanagians in my favor, not at the detriment of the table though. As a DM, I use most of these. Encumbrance is more of a "have you hit your max" type of thing, but I don't enforce it traditionally. I will calculate the weight they have on my own out of the session, and then will happen to find a weight based trap. I don't tell them to track encumbrance, I get them to tell themselves that. I have them track ammo as they can be used more than just for ranged attacks. A crafting material to make flaming arrows? Sling bullets can be used as a large ball bearing to check for traps. And the loot from enemies can make players want that random bandit attack to restock ammo. If they don't want to track magic items, you can always homebrew a quiver of plenty that gives endless arrows, or the like. Players don't pay attention to what the characters are eating. The bland food of is the same to them as royal feast on the level of food. I don't just encourage rations, I encourage cooking. The type of food by living style (poor, modest, ect.) can give a bonus I made for it. Rations count as a poor meal; it fills you, but does little else. A good soup and bread is modest and I let them get +1 healing on short rests if they eat modest meals at least twice a day. I got them hunting for food and foraging for ingredients to try and make the cooking checks to increase meal quality at every camp. Rent for inns isn't an issue, it is that or camping. Living expenses for downtime cover the other part, so there has been no issue there. Random encounters I have are based on the area. Animals even wolves would leave a group of adventurers alone. Bandits appear closer to roads, monsters further from civilization. And some of those random encounters will track the heroes to ambush them at camp.
I came up with some random encounter method that really works for my table. Recently I ran a more exploration based campaign where travel was an important component of the adventure. I get three players to roll a 1d12, 1d6, and 1d4. The 1d12 determines the behavior of the enemy, 1d6 determines a "complication", and the 1d4 determines the difficulty. My players are only aware of what the 1d4 does which I didn't intend at first, but it made or some really tense moments when the behavior is "ambush" and the encounter was max difficulty. When I finish rolling I do one of three things. 1, Include a story relevant event that matches the roll that I was already going to include at some point. 2, I run a small pre-planned, pre-balanced encounter that again matches the roll, 3 Use an online generator to get an assortment of monsters for whatever difficulty they rolled. This actually ends up being a fun exercise in improv because when I get a random monster cluster I have to come up with a reason why they are there in the first place and set a convincing scene. I found this often results in a ton more social encounters , stealth missions, and dramatic escapes all during a part of the session I did little to no prep for. This campaign was the first time I tried out random encounters but my players pretty much universally liked them. They do mess up pacing sometimes, but all in all they are a great way to bring a since of scale to a world during longer travel sequences.
For random encounters, I think Ginny Di has the best suggestion. On a 3 day journey, they come across a nobleman's cart that's been attacked by bandits. On day 2 they have a minor encounter with the bandits and maybe get some exposition about the nearby area from the nobleman. On day 3, they go to the bandit camp and clean house. When they enter the city, they've got the endorsement of this noble, a decent amount of knowledge about the city, and although he couldn't give them any gold, they've always got a place to stay at the nobleman's manor, free of charge.
I think people overthink the "random" part. In my Homebrew game I never do "random" encounters, but I do plan travel encounters that advance the overall plot in some way.
@@ArekesuLive That's definitely a valid way to do it, but I think the value of random encounters in the right style of game (outside of just challenge and more combat, where it's aimed at doing that) is to maintain the feel of a world that isn't entirely about you, or entirely about the overall plot because a 'real' world doesn't have an overall plot. Sometimes bandits attack because you exist in a world where there are bandits, and it's not at all because the bandits are secretly working for the corrupt nobleman your party is trying to bring down. So it's a question of taste, do you want a story that's kind of cinematic in the sense that everything that happens should be building toward a central plot, or do you want something more like the feeling of playing characters who live in a world that exists and does its thing without much regard for them.
This defeats the entire point of a random encounter. If I’m putting together random encounters it’s because I explicitly didn’t plan for something to happen over the course of a journey, anything else categorically is not random. If you have a *plan* for when and how the PCs are introduced to the situation that’s not really random.
The issue with these rules is that they are a legacy of older editions and older style of play. Back in older editions (OD&D, the basic books, and AD&D 1e) gold, was the way one acquired experience, it was the main driving force of going in the dungeon and pulling it out. Ammunition was easy to track because characters and sheet were simpler as well. Rations and water are of course, important only when relevant when it comes to exploration and travel in the wilderness a style of play that also has been poorly explained and treated. Which leads into, wilderness encounters. Wilderness encounters were dangerous and often treated with more caution because back then, you could encounter a dragon while traversing the wilderness regardless of level, not only that but PCs didn't heal like they do now (completely healing comes from 4e btw) All these rules enforce a different narrative, a different style of play. One where the pace was slower and the world of The PC wasnt constantly on fire and the adventures of levels 1-15 last more than month and a half in game.
I feel that the tedium of resource management is one of those things that exists more as a boogie man than an actual issue. the negative press that has been thrown out there against it as well as things like slower healing, has really soured (poisoned?) a lot of minds against even considering it. A lot of people might enjoy them, if only they'd try them. Some of my fondest memories of the game stem from when my character (and the party) were really down on our luck. Starving, out of arrows, running low on spell components and having to make those difficult (read as dramatic) decisions. That nail-biting feeling of counting your arrows down as you fight on through the adventure, far from town and hoping you can last. Spending time in camp trying to cobble together a few more arrows or foraging in the countryside for components. Risking your safety to get those expensive components when you were low on gold or not otherwise in a position to purchase them. Do you make that choice to be a thief, just to get the stuff you need to adventure? Do you take the bad deal or questionable job to make ends meet? Even in heroic fantasy there is a place for this. It might even serve well to temper the super-heroism of 5E (which I play). Adversity breeds drama and the best parts of our campaign came out of the decisions we had to make as much as those we chose to make. How many amazing scenes in movies, TV, and books occur for the want of something simple - money, rations, supplies, medicine, shelter - the list really does go on and on. Playing through these can be amazingly fun. Oh, and encumbrance was about way more than transporting gold in earlier editions. You know this, I'm sure, but for those who might be familiar, you were not limited in how many magic items you could possess and there were few limitations on how many you could use simultaneously. Also, in the absence of so many class and racial abilities, FEATs and the like, what you had on you very much was what you could do. Encumbrance also helped rope in your character's abilities.
Different people have immersion broken in different ways. As someone who hikes and backpacks, not including encumbrance or travel rules throws me right out of the narrative. My 8 str wizard can walk 20 miles a day carrying 80 lbs of stuff?! Are you sure?! What I have found is that encumbrance rules generally focuses the party on getting beasts of burden - which is a good gold sink and gives them precious pets to protect - and to really focus on what items they do and don't need. At higher levels magic can help solve this in a satisfying way. Just my $0.02.
As a big-time backpacker earlier in life, this. Very much this. I tend to track encumbrance as a player even if the campaign as a whole doesn’t because it helps my immersion.
That's actually the experience I wanted from Minecraft -- lost while backpacking or from a crashed ship/plane/etc. What's the first thing you do in such a scenario? Sure isn't punching a tree or crafting a workbench. So I tried to get a mod made that'd let you craft more things in your inventory and find more baseline resources (like twigs) before you got to the workbench stage. I feel similar about tabletops, but it's hard to find fellow players (of tabletops *or* of video games) who get the same engagement I get from the low-level survival side of things. ...also, our gaming group has had our horses lost or eaten so often that the thought of investing in horses is kinda laughable at this point. If you have them going into the adventure you sure won't have them on the way out (when they're more needed). (Man, I miss hiking. It's been a while.)
Heard from the table, “I not here to role-play an accountant.” In 1E GP Weight for things was also use for how awkward things were. A spear weight more in GP Weight than a long sword. I did not used encumbrance back then until I got a real world example. I was in a costume wearing 3 + swords, I had trouble walking through a door without the sword hitting the wall. But after a while it wasn’t fun. On rations and ammo, I don’t worry about it unless the story does. Like in Tomb of Annihilation. Currently material components are cheap. In fact Grand total cost of material components is 96,342 gp 3 sp 2 cp with the total of Consumed being 46,825 gp or 60,155 gp Non consumed 31,187 gp 3 sp 2 cp
in my most recent campaign I tried tackling the problem of the value of gold. My solution was to make things for sale that the players would actually want, like homebrew potion recipes or upgrading weapons or offering training to the players to teach them a certain feat that were relatively expensive to average 5e items. So far I would say that it's worked because now the party actively participate with these elements and have to make those tougher decisions of "who gets to upgrade their armor?" or the "no wait I wanna upgrade my sword and I wanna buy new armor instead!" and the "but we've been saving up to buy this furnished house" and such, which is really what I was looking for by implementing it this way.
Ticking clock’ is how we’ve always played, since the late 70’s, and it adds so much depth to the choices the player’s make. Random Encounters aren’t always, or even mostly, combat, rather they’re used to describe your world; environmental conditions, locations, NPC’s and evidence of monster passage all add depth to a session. Encumbrance is tough, but I ask every couple games, how much ‘free pounds’ does each character have. Great video.
There are some good ideas/systems out there for using die rolls to “track” different types of inventory. I believe the OSR book The Black Hack uses one of these systems. I’m going off (not so great) memory here, but You can have a ration die, quiver/ammo die, etc… basically the die size reflects how many of a thing you have (d20 for 20 arrows), after combat roll the ammo die. If you roll too low, you recover so few arrows that your ammo die drops from d20 to d12. If you find or buy more arrows, it can go back up. Or eventually it keeps shrinking and you run out of arrows. Or something like that… lol
I don't think it's a coincidence that these often-ignored rules are also just... The worst rules in the whole edition? Like it baffles me that 5e focused so heavily on bounded accuracy and small, easy to add numbers in combat, but then settled on an encumbrance system that involves multiplying your strength score by an amount so high it will rarely matter, and then having items that range from dozens of pounds to fractions of a pound and expecting in-person players to hand calculate this for weeks on end. It's a system so obtuse it begs to be ignored.
So high it will very rarely matter? You've obviously never played in or had any interest in playing in a survival based game. Your basic point is spot on though, the numbers are unreasonably high, an "average person" being able to carry 150lbs without being encumbered is nothing short of ridiculous. However, if you're playing a gritty survival based game (which is the only reason I imagine you'd want to consider half these rules) it's still not really all that much. I'm not sure where they got those numbers. An average healthy and relatively athletic person should be able to carry only about half their bodyweight without being notably encumbered, IF that weight can be properly distributed (a nice hiking pack for example.) So that number should really be around 10 at the absolute most, and that's still being somewhat generous. The rest of the encumbrance rules are also silly. A backpack can only carry 30lbs, I'm pretty sure an average high schoolers backpack has more than that in it.
Yeah. I looked at that stuff, and promptly gave my players a bag of holding AND a portable hole (for the big stuff). I simply don't want to FUSS with that stuff, myself.
@@AuntLoopy123 and that's exactly they point of how pointless those mechanics are, they are so useless they even gave the DM a way to say "I don't care about this" Bag of Holding is the "Get out of jail" card of the encumbrance monopoly
to me it depends: for instance I usually dont care about rations but if the party is going to travel trough a desert, how much water they bring suddenly is relevant. If they are traveling in a stable region with roads and/or patrols, I use random encounter only if I have some story hook behind, but if they're traveling in an unknown/savage/dangerous region then random encounters of beasts/bandits/enemies will definitely happen. Encumbrance, as long they dont collect dozens of weapons/armours/other things, I don't care, otherwise there's a bag of holding for sale at a local townshop...
So much to say! Soooo much! To avoid writing an essay, the difference is the style of game. A heroic game really doesn't need any book keeping outside of maybe ammo. Adventures should be about going far away, doing the thing, and getting back. The travel should matter, and there's almost no games where travel matters... or where downtime can happen. Rent only matters during downtime. Random encounters meanwhile are ideal for sandboxes that are plot light. Plot heavy games which DM's pretend are perfection can't use random encounters well. Beer and pretzel games can.
Big fan of this video. I'm enjoying these ones that trend a little ramble-y, it helps to just hear the different ways to use the mechanics. I'm gonna use several things from this vid. Definitely "picking 2 mechanics" and making a point to integrate them
I know this is not even close to the powerfantasy of 5E or modern D&D but tracking such things can add a ton of fun to the game if done right. It needs the group to plan and to think about their next step on a different level. As someone who always played low fantasy games I (and my group) really enjoy the long term pay off of a very well-planned adventure/expedition. There are tons of good encumbrance systems you can just substitute in. For encounters I usually go with what makes sense and I designed some "background clockworks" that keep the world alive and moving. Sure it is more work, but it makes the world feel real & with an inherent logic.
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Yeah. I gave my players actual tokens for each piece of ammunition (including thrown weapons like javelins). An unbroken toothpick is a javelin, and a half-toothpick is either an arrow or bolt, and quarter-toothpicks are bullets. When they use one, they put it in front of them. At the end of the battle, they roll perception for how many they can FIND (based on a fraction of how many they actually shot), and then roll again, for how many are actually salvageable. Except for magical ammo, which is always consumed, if it hits its target, and always salvageable, if it missed. But, if they see an arrow shaft sticking out of a torso, they can try to pull it out, without destroying it. Why not? More math-rock fun. I find that having the physical token helps a lot. BUT! Don't let them place the tokens on the board during the battle, because then you have try to remember which one is whose, unless you color-code your toothpicks.
A resource die mechanic could make tracking those easier. Just use a die of a specific size. Every critfail (or whatever value) your die drops one increment down. Until you are out. A perception check might give you back one increment after a battle.
But if i have say 50 arrows how long will that last me? easily 5-10 encounters. If there's not weight or cost then you get players with hundreds of arrows.
I don't mind tracking any of these, honestly. I think spell components add a nice flavor dimension to a spellcaster tossing a fireball - Liam O'Brien of Critical Role does a great job with this in Campaign 2 with his character Caleb Widogast. Makes casting the most basic spell more fun for the whole table. Rent is a good necessity item to bring up that helps drain a character's pockets on a consistent basis - especially at lower levels & the party doesn't have a permanent base of operations. Also, prepaying rent, for example, to keep one's non-campaign necessary stuff safe in their room is a nice bit of world immersion for the players. I am playing a ranged (bow) rogue right now & keep track of arrows as the adventure goes along. My DM has allowed my character to become a basic fletcher so that if I have time & materials I can offset my spent ammunition losses somewhat. Random encounters can be meaningful by having more than one roll per campaign day & have the players roll for the encounter, if any. Again something the Critical Roll campaign's have done relatively well - sorry, bit of a CR fanboy. ;-) As I am old enough to have played AD&D in the early 80s, rations make perfect sense to me & I have no issue accounting for them. As you stated, this really helps keep a ranger integral to a party's survival. We just finished the Frostmaiden adventure & my son was playing a ranger and was rather disappointed that the DM didn't really play up the survival aspect of the campaign - especially as we got further along in the adventure. Just made his character shine a little less when they should have been vital for the party's success. Finally, as a player of martial characters, I like encumbrance as it keeps STR from being a wasted ability score, excepting for to hit & damage with melee weapons & combat maneuvers. Encumbrance reduced my paladin's movement from 30' to 25' & his finding of the Boots of Springing & Striding was an important moment instead of being just another magic item in the rolled treasure. Would also keep it from becoming the complete dump stat in 5e that it seems to have become. That said, I will play what my table wants to play but I do think the tracking of these resources can definitely add to the campaign's flavor.
I'm planning to run Out of the Abyss and a few of these rules (especially rations and material compinents) are essential to give the feeling of the survival game that the first part of the module wants to be.
My rulings at my table: Encumbrance - track for stuff, not for coin, makes players make a choice about what they carry Ammunition - I have the players keep track untill they're powerful/rich enough to reasonably always just have more Rations - almost never consider it Rent - never comes up enough to worry about, players either stay 1 night at a place or just camp somewhere Material components - I encourage players to use and get them, if only for the roleplaying opportunities, but if a player doesn't want to engage in that it's an arcane focus. I always enforce components that cost money for balancing (revivify etc..) Random encounters - i have the players roll a dice and tell me the number. That determines the encounter for the day, whatever that may be. I only ever ignore this on a particularly down session to throw some combat in that makes the players feel good again
Tracking gold, encumbrance, and other things can be fun. (At least for some players.) I had a player hire two guards and buy a horse and wagon with the loot the party got from the first dungeon. Every item that was in every encounter after that was taken and sold off or hoarded on the wagon. Furniture, weapons, potions, arrows, javelins. He hired more guards, upgraded their equipment, and paid them well. He kept track of all of it in a binder or series of folders. By the end of the game the player had a standing army. A tower home and a small business. All with notes to back it up.
What’s sort of funny is I’m running Neverland right now from Andrew Kolb’s book and all these things are like 50% of our play, but they all organically feel important in a Neverland setting… simple materials are coveted for whimsical reasons, like thimbles being kisses, or thread being needed for trinkets the Lost Boys make… we’re exploring an island so wild encounters are the majority of our encounters… and rations and water are of dire importance except for the two people in the party that happen to be kids, as they can imagine the food into existence… encumbrance is the only thing I take lightly, but I just ask reasonable questions like where are you packing it or how are you keeping these things on you, and if they have to ramble too long then they probably need to find a place to stash stuff and come back for it. For fun I also tell them they can’t carry infinite gold… anything over a couple hundred pieces is gonna be super heavy so they are trying to figure out if the island has some equivalent of banks now lol
Out of GeekyDeron's list I only tend to track rations, material components and SOMETIMES ammunition depending on the game, as long as I ask the players beforehand and get a unanimous "That's fine" from them.
I have ammo be a thing to encourage my players to investigate the bodies and environment from their previous combat. I find that it helps the newer players keep track of their inventory and abilities.
I don't DM and I know I'm probably in the minority with this opinion. But I feel like resource management should be a part of the game. I don't care for infinite arrows, I enjoy the moments when you run out and need a clever solution. As for the spell casting side, I do think it takes away from it a bit with the focus and I feel why that is why Spellcasters are often (at least in my experience) seen as strictly better than martials.
Also, I had a character with a strength score of 1 and that has been the only time encumbrance has really mattered, since he is one of 6 characters i have had playtime with. He was for a one shot and could not carry the starting equipment (he was a Kobold Sorcerer made before racial negatives were removed). I don't think an entire campaign with him would have went well but he was loads of fun for that one shot. I also don't really have a lot of experience with different characters but they have all been strong enough to carry what they had on them plus some - especially my barbarian, my longest run character - still going strong
I think infinite ammo should be a magic item, either a magical quiver that replenishes or clones what you have in there (make an exception for magical arrows or dragons will be easy encounters) or a bow similar to Immortals that generates its own arrows. The latter should be a quest item (not a drop but its own quest) but the quiver could be a purchase item or random drop. That gives the DM a little more control over when the character get infinite ammo. As for spell casters, Wizards already have so much drain on their resources that components shouldn't be, up to a point. They have to buy paper and ink at 100gp/spell level, unless it's their school, then track how much they've used vs the spells they want to copy. Adding the spell components to that seems a bit overboard unless you really enjoy crunching numbers at your table.
@@narvalin5905 I like the idea for the bow and/or quiver. Definitely a good magic item. Forgive me if I misunderstood the rules (I've never played as or with a wizard), but I thought Wizards paid that when getting spells outside of leveling and such, which would be reasonable expenses for extra power - though if I'm wrong that makes wizards way more expensive than I thought. Though it doesn't address the other casters, I'd definitely see the benefit of not being too hard on it there - except for like a moment where it's like you're stripped of all possessions and you can find makeshift stuff. Like the fighter gets a rock or stick and the rogue sharpens a piece of flint and the casters scrounge up some supplies, and everyone shows that they are more than their equipment. Ending with them recovering their items and such.
@@TourFaint If you are spending your money on arrows and rations then you are interacting with the mechanic. And if you are carrying 200 arrows without something like a bag of holding you are going to be very uncomfortable -since a quiver holds 20, 10 quivers strapped all over your body sounds honestly both frightening and goofy. And I'm not saying go nitty gritty or anything but just a bit can add stuff that simply throwing out these mechanics can't have
@@TourFaint I mean if you ignore that your character actually has to carry all of these arrows then sure you aren't interacting much, but by you having to say you are going to the store you are by definition interacting with the mechanic, maybe not much but you are doing it. But it seems you are only looking to shoot down the idea instead of actually entertaining the idea that it doesn't have to be all bad
As a character with an 8 STR, a bag of holding and who constantly mentions performing their trade while on the road to ensure they always have something to sell back in the town, while having 3 spell slots and being yet to run out, I feel this. So much.
I'm personally a huge fan of encumbrance and keeping careful track of not only how much your character is carrying, but *where* they're carrying it. Not because I want the crunchy numbers, but because I think it adds to the immersion of the roleplaying experience. After all, your Wizard can't carry as much as the fighter, so he or she has to prioritize what they want to carry more. Do they take along that fascinating book they found? Or do they bring food? Do they buy a mule, and then have to pick and choose what they take in when they enter a dungeon? And who cares for the mule when they're in there? If they want to load their pack down with goodies then drop it in combat to move around more easily, go for it: but know what was in the pack, and what wasn't. I think these kinds of things give a lot of really fun opportunity to flesh out a character. I don't tend to do massive gold rewards, or massive magic hauls, so players rarely have to worry about sacrificing "valuable" loot due to weight... but I do like my players to consider, say, whether or not they have dry clothes if they're going into cold and damp regions, or whether they'll be eating cooked or raw food when they camp due to a lack of preparation. What they choose says a lot about the attitude their characters take to adventuring, and what that player themself is likely to prioritize in the experience. That said, I don't nickel and dime them. I stick by the manual's statement that you only track uses of spellcasting components with named values, I tend to be very lax on actually tracking usage of foodstuffs (especially if they have anyone in their party who can hunt and are in an area that's an option,) etc. I won't make them sacrifice X feet of rope each time they use it for something. It's all part of the worldbuilding to me: the players understanding that they are part of the world they're in.
I’m about to run a fallout style campaign and I’m unsure of the other options but I’m definitely going to have the players track ammo because I feel like committing to that system adds to the atmosphere of my world.
as a player i have always kept track of these because i find it really fun, and as a ranger i specifically go out of my way to forage for my rations when i run out, instead of using goodberry because thats wasting spellslots i need for hunter's mark. Its simply fun for me to track stuff like that.
If you want to avoid the "One random encounter each day of travel, so we might as well go all out each time," routine, you can roll a d4 every morning, to determine how many times you will roll on the encounter table. Alternately, make a LONGER table, with plenty of empty spaces, where nothing will happen. Or BOTH. TELL YOUR PLAYERS what you are doing, so that they know that they may, or may not, have up to 4 encounters, every day. Of course, not all encounters need to be combat. You could simply meet an interesting NPC, or find an abandoned farmhouse, or come across a REALLY PICTURESQUE SCENE, that makes them stop and smell the roses. OR maybe enchanted roses, and they have to make wisdom saving throws not to fall into a hypnotic trance, or whatever. It doesn't all have to be combat. Of course, there's always a chance you'll roll NOTHING, four times in a row, and have an uneventful day. But those are good, sometimes, too, right?
I improve random encounters by doing a bunch of dicerolls to kinda narrow down, and just improvise some story, often times narrating it something relating to one of the characters in the party. I roll a 1d4 to decide is it a monster, a random event, a story beat, or just an average day and nothing big happens. Let's go story beat. One of my players is playign a vengeance paladin- he used to wory as a bodyguard in a distant city called "The Menagerie" and it was an underground front for a sect of Bhaalists. They were basically using him as their main tool to violence so they could dodge legal consequence. Every once in a while he may find a caravan of one of those cultists trying to get them back- basically a "you're being hunted" deal. The players love it every time. And don't be afraid to have a giant eagle lay an egg while flying over and when it lands on a player you say "I suppose that's your rations covered for the day" It's an incredibly underrated tool to give players personalized story in little bite-sized nuggets. Then I hand;t rent, but it's come in a weird state that my players got lucky and bought homes in a capital city straight up, one owns a restaurant, and they have a bastion on the plane of water so.. well that isn't a thing for them? Ah well, they at least thought about it early.
I use the normal rules for components, basically if you use a focus you only need components for certain spells that require expensive components. Rations are really great since I like to run a lot of travel time and exploration, for rent I just have them state how long they stay and pay up front, ammunition depends, for arrows they can collect all arrows that actually hit enemies but only half that miss barring special circumstances, which helps mitigate restocking problems, and I only ever do random encounters after a large story encounter that wore the party down a bit. This way even these small encounters can feel very tense and gratifying when survived. And as for encumbrance, this depends. I use it for my current campaign only because I have a player that likes to hoard and having her realize suddenly that her hoarding is a problem that bogs her down in combat ended with a short roleplay moment where she spoke to the other characters, apologized for hoarding everything, and started actually sharing some of what she had. Though it was only the bare minimum, I still thought this was a nice character development moment. This is the only type of circumstance where encumbrance should be used imo.
I usually added random encounters at the end of a session when you don't have enough time to get into a combat that I have planned out. Expecting that boss fight to take to long but seeding in a smaller fight which should fit what time we have left. it also usually good because then they don't feel like any more then a short rest is good between them. There also adding them when the PCs rest. Random rolls at that point adds tension because they lower on resources. I have different to choose from to make sure it just right for what they have left. When DMing I found two of resources is the way to go but I usually do three. Arrows and spell components are one because they usually it covers almost all the character that way. They just spend the gold for the arrows on the honor system and we agree how many they can hold or if others have quiver on other characters just to refill someone supply in the dungeon. Small spell needs are the same way, but the expensive or rare I ask them to do between sessions and we text in case there some issue. I only limit it if they don't have the gold or just would not make sense they can get that where they are. Optional one is this. I only track encumbrance if using D&D Beyond since the system does it for us. I add the gold weight in. Normally I don't care except I felt like I had to enforce it because 4 Str character with heavy armor. There also the Dragon hoard situation. There should be so much gold that there no way they can get it home. I had the argument where players insist they could carry it all. This fixed that. I track time. I give them time sensitive quests. Sometime I give them multiple. Then they might have to choose do we save this person who important to one or two of us or track the cultist that we know has the item they wanted. When they are not under any perceived time limits I just remind the players there might be a time limit you are unaware of. I usually do this when they keep trying to long rest way to often. It seems to do the trick after having dealt with other time sensitive quests. They realize they might not know what changing but something is changing. After the fight I might peel back the curtain a little just so they understand what changed. Usually motivates them to stay on a reasonable time frame.
Despite never having an issue personally with tracking ammo (just keep a note within your inventory, y'all), I think a faster way to do things is to just have a set amount of ammunition that is approximately "spent" per encounter, and have the players pay to "restock" at each shopping event, based on how many encounters you went through since you last restocked. For example: James the archer fought in 5 encounters, and harvested arrows after one of them. If your standard ammo number is 20, then James needs to restock 4.5*20=90 arrows, at 5 copper per arrow. 90*5= 450 copper, or 4.5 gold to restock after 4.5 battles worth of arrow loss.
One of the biggest problems with D&D and RPGs in general is the casual or cavalier way in which wealth is treated, considering that the archetype of fantasy is the medieval period. In medieval England, for example a gold mancus (copied from the Islamic dinar) was about 20 mm in diameter and contained about 4.25 grams of gold. This is roughly equivalent to the size of a US nickel coin. A mancus was said to be worth a month's earnings for a skilled craftsperson, so 100 gp is over 8 years' of income for a middle class person. D&D has PCs starting out with the equivalent of 50 gp in equipment, materiel, and coinage, a sum which would represent over 4 years' income. For a middle class person to be able to save 4 years' worth of income might take decades. US nickels typically come in $2 rolls, or 40 coins. If you had 40 gp in a small belt pouch, you would be walking around with more money that most people in the world would ever see in one place at one time, and for a lot of people, more than all the money they would ever see in their lifetimes. And at today's prices (about $1750 USD/troy oz), 1 gp would be worth about $240 USD, so that "roll of nickels" would be equivalent to casually strolling about town with $9600 USD cash in your wallet. That certainly gives you a bit more perspective that might help inform a DM and PCs about how realistic economies might function in a fantasy setting. it would be quite easy to put 100 g worth of gold coins in a belt pouch, but it could cost you our life if anyone finds out what's in there.
I would love to play in a game that you are describing! The more immersion the better in my mind, if I'm a player. But I agree, if I'm running a game, I try to make sure it includes what everyone wants.
Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars RPG handles ammunition by not requring players track it, but letting the GM say they run out of ammo for the weapon used if they roll a Despair, which can happen on a successful roll (even one that also has a Triumph). And when ammo runs out a weapon needs to be recharged/reloaded either by using a (reasonably cheap) consumable item or automatically during downtime (ie. resting for an evening or while travelling between planets). I really like that approach, but you'd have to change some details for a fantasy setting where the only ammo is arrows. To me Encumbrance generally only matters when selecting basic loadout and when figuring out whether a character can carry extra stuff to camp/base/transport. And that's usually something like: Standard loadout is x, new items are y, is x + y < encumbrance? To me Rations are only important in harsh environments when food can be scarce. And Rent needs to be a dramatic focus for it to matter. Material components can be a tool to make the magic of a setting feel different, but most of the time I'd rather just limit them to special spells.
I've had pretty poor experiences with some of these mechanics as a player when a DM implemented all of them but then never gave us the option to find a workable solution (example: tracking ammunition but punting us from dungeon to dungeon so there was NEVER a chance to buy arrows). This definitely colored my approach when I began DMing. As a DM I'm a stickler about components with a financial value, but for the rest, either players use a focus, or, if they WANT components, I assume they pick the free ones up as they go and use them for flavor (like Liam did in CR season 2). I hate encumbrance SO MUCH that I hand out bags of holding very early on. I do ask about rations and food (for characters and even their pets/mounts) but I make acquiring it relatively easy and reward players who think about it unprompted (someone went to buy apples for the horses? I might offer inspiration or just do something special for that player with the animals themselves, since it's almost always an animal lover who thinks of this in game). For random encounters, I occasionally throw in more than one a day and/or have waves to the encounter so players need to budget their resources a bit. I'll admit to never tracking ammo because I'm apparently still traumatized by that old campaign that ended ages ago. 😂 I've honestly never considered rent as most of my parties live on the road, but I do make them pay for inns, and in my one long term campaign they have use of a pirate ship and the captain will take them places, but in return they have to pay a tithe to the Plank King (campaign is set in Wildemount) from each adventure they compete and the players know this and save for it, which I guess is like rent?
Kinda late to be commenting, but I just started learning Pathfinder 2e and one thing that surprised me is that their rule of encumbrance is *much* simpler than 5e. Basically, instead of using weight, it uses "bulk" which is an abstraction that works with small whole numbers making it much easier to track. Even the rule for coins is simple: divide by a thousand rounding down and you get its bulk value.
I like the idea of managing arrows and rations. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but I like it. I don't think rations are as important most of the time, unless wilderness survival is a big part of your campaign (like trekking through a vast wilderness/desert). One rule I've thought about using to somewhat reduce the resource management, but still make it a financial aspect, is that whenever you get to town just charge the players for a new quiver of arrows (or other ammunition) and rations for however long they traveled. This keeps up the fiction that the characters are replenishing their stocks of equipment, but tones down the strict resource tracking.
The fit for the game definitely matters since not every game has a way to put these things into focus. My boyfriend runs a DC game and I highly doubt Dick Grayson had to worry about rent. For my dnd games, I try to accommodate but so have things matter. Every PC can have a bag of holding but if the bandits knock you out, that is literally all your stuff. I also put a body chart that shows that you can only have so many things "active" so people don't feel tempted to go to video game mode and toggle through all their weapons. Spell components tend to matter since there is always a spell they want to cast that they don't have access to and I have it be a side quest and they might have to get more than just the components. If my group wants a benefactor so they don't have to worry about money, well now you have to explain why that flaming eldritch sword was so important to the mission. They want that sword since they paid for it and they send something worse than murders: lawyers. The way I deal with random encounters is very much how would the wild actually act. On top of that, if they get closer to a dungeon, the increase in encounters could signal that they are going the right way. Rations tend to come into play when they want to go off the roads so no passing street vendors or rest stops to rest and eat at. Higher risk for higher reward though. It also plays into if they want to take a rest in a dungeon. I tie the idea of hit points to rations, which act as "health packs" of sorts. Your character has the ratings to stave of exhaustion and to use hit die. At least that's how I explain it. Ammunition can be flexed a bit but that enchanted crossbow might not be able to be further enchanted and it becomes more stressful when it gets lost or damaged. Can't just repair it like an ordinary crossbow. That's some of the ways I have adjusted things but still had consequences that hopefully capture the spirit of the rules.
I like this. I'm gearing up for a cursed forest type survival game I'm running in 5e, and I'm having a lot of thoughts about what mechanics are worth it. HP as a resource is reflected in Hit Dice, which I think get critically under-utilized, ar least in the games I've ran. So I'm having 1hr of rest mean a choice: 1 hit die spent to heal, or 1 hit die regained. At least, I wanna try that out. Rations and ammo seem the closest to what needs to be focused on to capture a survival-heavy game. But I have no experience with them. I don't know whether my players will wanna track them. Hard to say
Material components: The ones that have a cost or get consumed aside, making it so a lot of spells need material components also gives you a vector to de-power the wizard for a dramatic moment. Like... you can strip your wizard's gear and throw him in prison; then his options for escape are severely reduced; and he has several ways to overcome this challenge, ranging from just kind of dealing with it, to foraging his surroundings for things to use *as* material components. Whereas if you ignore the mechanic altogether, it's not so easy to just do that. Encumbrance is kind of in a weird grey area. For a PC using the standard array or point buy, their encumbrance is going to be 120-300 pounds; which is high enough where you will *never* have to worry about whether you can carry all of the gear that you're expecting to actually use in an adventuring day. It's just for picking up loot, and like... that's not really what the game is about anymore. For the large part, it's mostly just there to ensure that the players don't try to do anything *too* stupid, like lugging a ballista they ripped off its mount around. Ammo, rent, rations, and random encounters all sit in the same boat, as they serve as ticking clocks, or spinning plates. You can't just go out into the woods and comb every square inch for the Lost Temple of Azaza'toth because you need to eat, and might get mauled by wild turbobears. You can't just sit in town for the rest of forever because you'll need money to maintain your lifestyle eventually. Ammo is needed because without it, a ranged weapon is just straight-up a better option than a melee weapon all of the time (I mean, there's still the issue of cantrips that wizards can cast infinitely forever, and that aren't super hard for other classes to get ahold of, but that's a different kettle of fish). As an aside, is the loophole your thinking of for getting around rent like... having proficiency in artisans tools and getting a real job? Finally, for random encounters; if your players are just blasting all of their resources because you only throw one random encounter at them a day, then just... don't do that. Make your random encounter roll more than once a day (I use 3, personally; morning, travel, night). Let them hit a random encounter the day-of, just before they get to their target location.
I always have my players track encumbrance rations and ammo. I love having monsters do night raids where they have stolen these items from the players because they didn’t put up anyone for a night watch. It might seem as a mean thing to do players but its is a great side quest for them. In the morning they have to make the decision if they want to try and track down who stole the stuff and how are they going to get it back.
I think that you kind of need to have several of the resource mechanics for them to matter. If I don't need to track encumbrance I can just buy one million arrows and then I no longer need to worry about ammunition. If I don't need to track arrows then they don't take up carrying capacity so I can suddenly carry more making encumbrance matter less. The same is true for all other things with weight like rations etc. Even spells that remove or reduce the need for a resource are themselves resources and means that the character wont have other spells. If you only have a few resource mechanics you just max them out and forget about them. If you have several it becomes a decision where you have to think about what you will need. That being said, a lot of campaigns probably don't need resource management mechanics at all. And the more mechanics you have the more book keeping it is to keep track of them.
I always track time, rations, ammo, spell components and things like that. This is not opt-in at my table. I think it makes the game more immersive and makes spending and buying resources more meaningful. Its not difficult to do anyway and the players can get them easily enough so that its not a huge worry unless they're far from civilization, and that is good because it makes wilderness scarier. Encumbrance, I do track but I am pretty lenient on it. Their backpacks can be encumbered and the character can drop it and no longer be encumbered if a fight breaks out. So penalties only apply while they're traveling. And they have plenty of ways to make that a non-issue such as getting a carriage. I think dropping backpacks could be cool too since the players may have left some things in their backpack like a weapon they want to switch to, so they have to double-back to it, grab the weapon then return to the fight.
Check out the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks by Joe Dever. They’re freely available on Project Aon. In them, you do indeed track your rations, and there’s an ability you can choose which lets you hunt or forage in most areas to find food, but if you don’t have rations and can’t hunt, you’ll take damage. You also have a limited number of inventory slots, which simulates encumbrance tracking. Ammunition doesn’t really come up because the best weapon in the series is a sword. Maybe tracking these resources is more important in a small group.
I’m seriously old-school. I track everything. But then I have played in campaigns where that was important. A caravan guard makes less pay than an experienced tracker, so when there is a need for coin, there is always coin to be made. Rent is never an issue for a Druid or ranger, because they’re perfectly comfortable avoiding cities. Food is rarely an issue, because that forage can feed you for multiple days from one time foraging. Encumbrance is their nightmare. Smart players make their own hooks. The adventuring company charter in Cormyr was always a good one and it cost them a thousand gold pieces that no one had early on. A well-designed world puts those right out in plain sight.
The way I run random encounters is that I made a D12 table with 6 encounters like Matt Colville. I use them when they roll poorly on survival checks to navigate the wilderness and just choose them to be quick and fun and make the world feel alive. Some examples in the desert the game is in: quicksand, striges in a canyon cave, a lizard folk assassin etc
How I handle these things in campaigns I run: 1) material components; if you have your gear, you have a sufficient supply of trivial components (i.e.: no stated GP value). As a reminder, a spell focus doesn't replace components that have a listed cost 2) encumbrance as needed; are you making a cross-country trek, and need to haul something that has significant mass? Yes, your encumbrance will come into play 3) rent; yep, I have them pay for room and board if they're in a town. I don't do "lifestyle" stuff. 4) ammunition; simply put, yes, the PCs need to keep track 5) wealth; this also ties into encumbrance. There's a reason PCs like finding gems. Also dovetails into spell components 6) random encounters; yep, I use them. It's a bit more work in Roll20, but I do it. If I see the PCs always going nova because they are metagaming, thinking there's only going to be that one encounter, I will add others.
A possibly hot take; Rereading the King Killer Chronicles when you are older leads to the unfortunate realization that the lead character is basically the power fantasy of an awkward edgy teenage boy. For as widely regarded as the two books are, comparing it to something like a sitcom in terms of its simplistic but effective appeal isn't as much of a leap as youd think.
I really enjoy the style of play that manages these (though slot based encumbrance is the way to go. Check out Pathfinder 2e). But it’s super campaign and table dependent. In my 5e curse of Strahd game, we don’t track this at all and there are fewer wilderness encounters. In my OSE sandbox game, we track all of this. I have found having a pile of glass beads representing food and water in front of you and removing them as they deplete takes the tracking load off of the players and keeps it visible to the table. ALL random encounters should serve the narrative or the world and DON’T have to be combat encounters. You encounter pilgrims on their way north to the temple and can provide some hooks in that direction. You encounter desiccated corpses of a caravan and strange hoof prints nearby. They get some stuff off the caravan and now have a mystery in the world to solve if they want to. They encounter bandits who are yelling about some aspect of faction conflict that the players haven’t encountered yet. If you tie random encounters to the world, factions, hooks, etc. they feel so much less random and boring. So, it can be great! Or terrible! It just depends on the fiction and what the table wants.
My personal problem with encumbrance isn't the carrying capacity itself. That part's fine, usually. It almost never becomes a crippling issue (unless you roll a 6 and the only stat you can afford to have be that low is Strength…). The problem _I_ have is that the fantasy characters I'm interested in playing aren't the ones lugging massive backpacks around everywhere they go, even in fights! I'd much rather have a JRPG-style shared hammerspace inventory. Tracking ammo and even rations is fine, the problem I have ends up being with tracking what my character is carrying and where on their person they're carrying it, 'cause it interferes with the vision I have of my character. Basically, it's not the weight limit that's the issue, it's the fact that in order to have all the basic supplies for adventuring I have to carry around 60 pounds of stuff.
I play in a game where our DM encourages us to track these things but don't enforce it if we don't or just forget. Personally I really enjoy having to track all these things because it has led to some really fun rp moments. Like the time one of the other PCs decided to run away, but I knew he would be killed if he wasn't back before dawn. I already had enough exhaustion that I was at half speed, and I had managed to get ahold of the PC's sword which had been stolen. Carrying the sword put me over my carrying capacity so I was now encumbered and with the exhaustion I was at 1/4 speed. I'm "running" through the streets as fast as I can, dragging this massive sword behind me, plaintively calling for my friend trying to get them to come back. Eventually I find him but he refuses to go back, so for his own good I knock him out. Of course now I have the problem of how to get him back. I don't have any money, so I can't just pay the guards to just carry him for me, so I have to lie my ass off telling them that their boss wants this done. It was a very stressful moment, wondering if we were going to get back in time, which wouldn't have been a big deal at all without these "tedious" rules. So, Yes, I am a big fan of using and keeping track of all these things!
Make random encounters either matter or non combat related. Pretty soon I’m going to be running my players through a caravan style two weeks of travel. At several points I have a “planned random encounter” but I’m specifically pointing out the other guards are dying and at the week and a half point they stop at a roadhouse for days to replace them. Other things are going to happen at the roadhouse, but these “Random encounters” are what caused the caravan to stop for as long as they will.
i love resource management and wish the gaming community took it more seriously. i'm new to d&d but i'm very not new to the sims, and in the sims community ppl complain all the time about money being meaningless and how easily it is to get money. i play the sims a lot, and i NEVER use money cheats. when it comes to finances, i play the sims 4 as it's intended to be played, and i find getting money to be hard and stressful! it's a challenge to increase sims' wealth over time, and i find that challenge fun, so i get annoyed when other simmers whinge about the superfluity of money when they're using cheats to get it. i would love a d&d game where keeping track of resources is essential (the character i've never gotten to play is a girl who hoards money bc she's the only breadwinner for her family back home) and you've given me a lot to think about wrt the campaign i'm about to start running for my friends.
One compromise I've seen on encumbrance is just to handwave the weight of "standard equipment" - stuff they've become so accustomed to carrying/wearing that it no longer phases them. Focus the rule on stuff that's comparatively important - loot, hauling bodies, etc. Also, I tend to give coinage in weight not amounts. It reinforces how heavy coins can be & bypasses that amusing "did we really sit here and count out each individual coin?"
Ooh it would be fun to say “here’s how many pounds of coins you have” and then figure out/tell them the total when they count it up. I actually really like that…
I think all of these things are a lot easier to handle and more fun at lower levels a lv1 encounter has a lot less for both the DM and player to track so keeping up on ammo and spell components is a lot less tricky but as Matt Mercer pointed out to Vex theres a pint when they have enough flowing income that it’s safe to assume they can get all the supplies they need whenever. For the random encounters instead of just scaling them up to ridiculous levels I like moral quandaries like a broken down merchant who is selling to a criminal organization that the group is opposed to. They can help this innocent person or leave them alone in the wild to likely die and the criminals will be less supplied and maybe even hungry and tired when the players face them or they can help and therefore establish their enemies supply chain
Pathfinder 2e has these same issues. I enforce encombrandce because Paizo simplified it from actually needing to know the actual weight of things, and it is now tracked in bulk. Most characters can carry about 5 bulk. That is so much easier to track now, so I make the players track it. The other I track is time. I do this because I created a calendar for my setting and made it relavent in a campaign where time mattered. I leave the count of ammunition to my players, and never bring up food, material components, and so on. As for random encounters, I stopped using them ages ago. The reason being is that they never felt pertinent to the story. These days I plan an encounter and make it feel random, but I have no need to ensure an encounter appears in every session.
I've never actually rolled on a random encounter table. Usually I read what encounters the table suggests and then hardcode some of them into certain parts of the story/spots on the map where it actually makes narrative sense for that encounter to happen
For making these a pressure you also need to work out at what assumed level they are overcoming that pressure because they do earn more usually as they level. So at level 5 is adventuring still a desperate struggle to earn enough to live or has it already just become that little nuisance that makes you a copper short for the new magic item you want? Because keeping resources meaningful throughout means either continually adding on new resource drains as they get stronger and richer or making rewards pretty flat no matter the level. For the later it might seem bad getting the same amount for clearing out a few goblins as for slaying an elder brain but it does incentivise moral choices. If they are strong enough to steal a dragon's hoard does it matter that it's a gold dragon that never bothered people? Do they help poor villagers in need or do they focus on jobs from wealthy merchants and nobles? Resources can even change. Food or water may not be tracked at the start, but as a drought moves in they become rapidly dwindling resources both for themselves and for communities.
I ignore most of these because they take too much time at the table, both to keep track off and for the players to accurately deal with. The pacing of any story is critical, and if the pace of play at your table gets too slow, it can really hurt the experience of the players. So no ammunition, rations, rent or wilderness encounters for me. (Encumbrance is done by DnD Beyond, I find spell components mechanically interesting, and I make explicit encounters for exploration.)
Personally, I think the main reason the resources don't matter is that you don't need them. Ammunition? Given you regain half of spend ammo, and given ranged combat is rather rare, most groups won't get empty quivers before reaching nearest pit stop. Encrumbance doesn't matter, because nobody really does gold hoards anymore. Gold doesn't matter, because with how the prices are set, and how the loot tables are made, you only need one bandit band per half year to make your ends meet. To make these things matter, you don't need to make them the narrative focus of the story. You need to make them so that they will help to tell the story. For example, in Ironsworn, all these expendables are simply put under "Supply". You lose supply as outcome of being hit (broken equipment), enduring harsh conditions (e.g. spend water when traversing desert), or having to refill your quiver etc. Having no supply means you have penalties for your rolls. Suddenly, all the resources come back. Random encounter with a bear is suddenly a threat, because if it lands an attack, it might destroy your supplies for your trip. Lose enough arrows, and you suddenly have to decide whether you packed extra ammo, or food. And so on. The mechanic simply lends itself to being part of the combat, and thus story. Also, important to mention is, that you don't lose your supply by simply camping. You are assumed of being capable of finding enough food and water to refill your suplly pack. Which, I feel, is another important aspect. You don't care for supplies, until they are dramatically important. Camping isn't. Losing your backpack as result of your clumsiness on the icy ledge? Is.
So, the only system I can really give any advice on is Random Encounters. My players seem really engaged in them, so I thought I'd share. I bring up multiple different tables. Some have been scoured from the internet and some have been created from my own head. Sometimes, I'll have an idea of what I want to have happen already in my head too. Then, I'll have one of my players (randomly chosen) roll a 1d100. Then I'll see what the result is on each of the tables, and from there, I let my imagination run wild. There's a pretty famous random encounter of a group coming across 2 arguing men outside of a dragon lair. If the men are too loud or can't be calmed, the dragon appears and it ends badly. Well, I rolled this up along with an encounter about finding a shrine and finding a shortcut. I also knew I wanted to plant a seed of the bigger threat going on in the world. So, the party comes across the two arguing men. They are arguing because their village was burned down and one of them desperately wants revenge, and he believes the dragon did it. The dragon turns out to be a Copper Dragon (acid), so clearly not the culprit, and the party gets the chance to both tell the men this as well as make a friend of the dragon. The party goes to investigate the town where they then follow the trail of devastation to a burning forest to face a "random encounter" of magmin that were summoned by an known figure in red. They then return to the dragon who provides them with a shortcut home. Bam, mashed together like 3 different random encounters, sprinkled in some overarching plot stuff, gave them a new ally, and also got them to change terrains for the next day of travel as they are now under a mountain. Wooo~ Random encounters, I see them as branching off points, stuff to inspire the DM. They're random, which makes them fun, but they don't have to be disjointed from the main narrative or serve no purpose. Sometimes they'll just be random - sometimes bears are just hungry and attack, yknow? - but they don't always have to be. Random encounters are a way to make the world feel alive and always shifting, and definitely a way to keep the players on their toes. And don't stop at one! I meshed 3 random encounters into one in this description, obviously, but you can also see all 3 and then be like "Well, I guess the players are having a very busy day today >:) " and that's totally fine too and can breakup that idea of BLOW EVERYTHING!!! that comes with random encounters.
I find that with VTT, where you have something that calculate your encumbrance and ammo count, these mechanics stop being so encumbering to the fun. Instead they start to affect how much and what you get out of Dungeons/encounters. Some of us older role players stop using these two things because it became too hard to keep track of everything.
@@SupergeekMike Yeah I didn't realize it myself until I started using Foundry VTT, it does a lot of the tedious background stuff so it doesn't slow down the important stuff. There is one thing we gamers are, and it's lazy, lol. So anything that makes it easier to jump into the fun parts we're gonna take.
It seems like I'm in the minority in the hobby, but I actually really enjoy resource managing as a part of the game. I think they can be fun, or at least interesting, and I never quite "got" why people complain about them. Except for encumbrance when I was playing 5e, since that one is... well, for one I, like most people on this planet, don't know what a pound is. So I have no idea if the weight of an item makes sense or not. Plus, in 5e, I remember that it wasn't uncommon for my characters to start with more equipment that they can carry. Again, I have no idea if that makes sense since I don't know what a pound means. Now I play Pathfinder2e which has a much better system. Ammunition and rations are really easy to manage, I'm specially left scratching my head at all the people that don't track ammunition (and I got a player get angry at me because I told him that I do track it). Also Legolas... does runs out of arrows... in the books. Or at least I remember a scene in which he has to scavenge for Uruk-hai arrows since he is running low after all that adventuring. Rent, I think, is the easiest of those to manage (well, aside from random encounters, since that is all work for the GM), I actually never heard somebody complain about it. Material components, if we are talking about the ones that can't be replaced by a material components pouch, should absolutely be tracked since most of those are supposed to act as limiters for casters. Assuming the players don't have infinite gold anyway. Which brings me to the resource that encompass five of the six (and sometimes all six) of those enumerated in the twit: Gold. I think a big reason D&D5e players don't care about those resource management mechanics is because it doesn't matters. Again, I don't play 5e anymore so I might be very wrong here, but I can't remember a lot of thing I wanted to buy when I was playing 5e. There was plate mail and some spell foci, but that's about it. Meaning that, by level five or so you don't really have an use for cash anymore, and it just sits there. You don't have trouble carrying all your loot because you don't care about picking up loot, you don't care about your ammunition because you can just buy more than you could ever use, same for rations and rent. The only times I used to hoard money in 5e was when I wanted to buy a house or a ship, and those were character reasons that had little to do with the story. Otherwise I just forgot about it entirely.
What I do with random encounters. Is I go to the 1st principle of a random encouter is emersion. This means that the random encounter is firmly in the discovery not the combat fun/mode. This means that the combat mechanics are wholly inappropriate ( that is to say actively fun-dastroying) for this scene. Ideally if I have a group that trusts me enough. I will run it the way critical role g m runs a lot of the chase/escape scenes. This alternate method still follows narratively but gives the players the appearance of control of a mechanic. It is one role for the person on watch. Then the players collectively decide their collective approach from stealth, diplomacy, combat, or creative. A net failure on this role leads to a second roll where their first option is eliminated and the option of flee is added. One failed group raw results and one scene for each role plus an additional seen resolving the issue. Two field group rolls precipitates a side quest session. Research failures and I pull out my three act (session) alternatives to t p k book. This is the world getting in the way and having an entirely separate interrupting story on your way somewhere. P s I find the problem of having more gold than is useful as an artifact of ignoring these gold sinks. 1st sink being just because there's gold in the dungeon doesn't mean you can bring it back. The second is that realism rethere's expenses especially if you've got something like a stronghold. 3rd the increased expenditure adds to the spell slots in improving the fighter/caster balance problem. Fourth lead regular expenses of life are both a theme setting artifact and a gold sink. This is why having in game time not too terribly much slower than real time is so important. 5th lay if you accumulate too much gold anyway. That's the time to start working on a gold sink project. Strongholds being a classic example ball and that 1 creates an additional daily expense. Thanks but orders are an equivalent that does both end treatises are a repeatable sync sync that affects a characters standing in the world. I guess all of these generally are standing affecting long term downtime projects.
Resource management in Curse of Strahd is a tricky one. I have made them get creative carrying coin about though not super strict on the rues but managing their resources now they are actually in the castle has become tricky for them. Everywhere else they've been managing like everything is a random encounter (fight fight rest fight rest etc), and maybe that's on me, but resting is harder in the belly of the beast.
For random encounters and PCs gojng nova… just don’t have a long rest result in the PCs getting all their resources back… mainly HP. Especially in the wild (i.e. outside a comfy bed at an inn)
If we look to our Appendix N for inspiration "rent" was incredibly important to Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Tolkien made a point of telling us Legolas collected arrows from the orc quivers to replenish his ammo along the way. And spell components being rare and wondrous for more powerful spells is a nice limiter on the spell use. Resurrection requires a diamond worth a large amount, how many diamonds are worth much? IF the worth was 50 million dollars american we have 8 choices worldwide on Earth that fit the bill.Getting one of them should be an adventure in itself. Encumberance should be given a nod to try and stop all characters from looking like a fully laden Nodwick. Not knowing any better a friend was carrying around a Howitzer in Call of C'thulu since it was the gun with the most damage.All of these rules give the grounding sense of realism to make the fantasy world work. Avoid the unlimited ammo six-shooter give motivation for some character to be there. Each of these rules should be considered before ignoring o
I’m going to say that my dm does not, to my knowledge, force us to strictly monitor our encumbrances unless we choose to. He has specifically not said to monitor coinage. Now for the rest, rent, ammunition, etc, he specifically does and food in particular is monitored because that is a tension in the module we use and is part of the story. As for random encounters, weirdly enough, because I am the ranger and I did choose a favored terrain and it is the main one of the campaign that we travel through….yeah there is low chances of issues. At most we are likely to run into blizzards which are a mechanic specific to the module and the story. There is a lot of fighting against the environment in the story of this module which is why our dm tracks this. He just doesn’t mess with encumbrance much because we actually don’t get to carry much, don’t earn a ton, and we play with a very small group which means it can be difficult to carry the amount of food and other supplies we need while spending so much time as we require in the wilderness. Sure, I am catch my own rations most times. But this is the Arctic which means, even with my bonuses from favored terrain, I’m not likely to find much and I risk more doing so as it takes time to do this, thus raising chances of being caught in a blizzard.
also along the line of resource management and costs are things like hirelings and feed for horses. I find that players these days don't even think of hiring people and never question how much it might cost to have crew with the party, be it some guy that owns a cart and horse to help with travel and carrying supplies and treasure or hiring a member of the thieves guild to pull a job either to get something for the party or to create a distraction on the other part of town. Now with things like ships in spelljammer the option of crew and ship supplies and docking fee more viable. and for games like Dark Sun that take place in a scorching wasteland where water and food can't just be found by looking in the woods as you travel, and thinking about the weight of a gallon of water per person a day for a 5 day journey between towns with no refill points along the way. That is a lot of a persons encumbrance, so do you get a pack animal? how much food and water will it need on the trip?
Anyone that has ever played a Bethesda RPG knows encumbrance and how little it matters because by the EIght, I will take all 500 kilograms of stuff that I have just looted to the nearby store even if it is the last thing I do. I've been playing Kingdome Come: Deliverance recently, and most of these mechanics actually come into play in some way in it, like, for instance, saving the game is (primarily but not exclusively) tied to a specific in-game consumable that is actually pretty pricey. Made the game a lot more interesting and engaging, to me. Random encounters, in particular, were a lot more of a whole encounter compared to an encounter in Skyrim. I think it's mainly a stakes concern since in Skyrim the player is virtually a god, and most encounters are an obvious "I'll take care of these guys and sell their stuff to the closest buyer," whereas in Kingdome Come, the character can barely hold a sword, let alone swing it with any competence. I think that tying random encounters' flavor and the stakes related to them is what makes for compelling encounters at any stage of a story, though it definitely is hard to achieve when the players are virtual or in some cases literal gods. Making random encounters not strictly involve combat is a good way around that, I feel. Fallout 4 has some neat fluff encounters that are lore related and don't necessarily lead to combat and definitely give some color to the usual monotony of "never should have come here" style encounters. In Kingdome Come, there was one particular encounter that I still keep thinking about because it was so cool and fun to navigate, where I was near-lost in a forest trying to find something, and I heard sounds of combat from up ahead, so I approached and saw two groups of well-armed combatants fighting one another, and since I'm carrying almost no arrows and melee combat is already very challenging (and also what are these 'health potions' people keep mentioning?), I immediately started seriously thinking about my options. Natural instinct was wanting to get in on the action but also worrying that they'd both turn on me given the option, or that they're perhaps officials of some sort that getting involved with will not be good for me. At some point, I realized that one of the groups wasn't hostile toward me at all and was most likely a group of guards, so I managed to find an angle of approach, and even then, with the enemy focus divided, I still nearly died because the other side was in-universe a far more capable combatant than I. When the dust settled I still came out with some good loot I need to haul and experience points, as well as a couple of wounds that I needed to tend to, but it was so much more of a whole experience than almost any random encounter I've had in a game before. The only thing I lacked was actually being able to converse with the guards and ask what was going on, and even that I think was the result of the "interactable" npc being dead. I'd personally take this kind of encounter over, say, random vertibirds crashing while supermutants and BoS members wildly fire lasers in my general direction, any time, even though both are pretty cool encounters. There was somewhere I wanted to go with all this, but I kinda got lost in remembering the encounter and forgot it, but yeah. I feel that random encounters can and should be something to at least partly focus on, personally.
When I was a DM I told my players that they had one of two options to choose from (for ammunition) 1) Keep track of it. 2) Don't keep track of it & when you roll a nat 1 you are now out of ammo. Nobody can give you any. You now can't use the weapon until you go buy ammo.
My favorite character currently in a game I am playing is a Damphir. Who feeds of blood. He has a flask with 3 "meals" in it. That's it. So three days of safe eating before it starts to get worrisome. I enjoy it in roleplaying as well. As both me as a player and as the character feel the Paranoia.
I think the core issue that you hit on was that gold doesn't really matter. You get so much of it, and there's so little to spend it on that you actually need, that these mechanics are kind of rendered useless. If you care ammunition, say, but not about encumbrance, then your archer could just purchase 1000 arrows and that would at least theoretically be okay. Ditto with food or rent or whatever. I think as a DM, if you really want to play with these mechanics, the best way probably is to really lean into them: Say, for example, your kingdom is set in the middle of a terrible drought and starvation is rampant. Food prices are wildly inflated to the point where food takes up a significant portion of the party's budget, if you can even find someone willing to sell it... Or perhaps they need to think carefully about how far they can travel or risk running out. The roads are unsafe because many wild beasts are becoming increasingly desperate and/or brigands are out trying to rob travelers for food supplies (or, if you want to go even darker with this line of reasoning, you can). Possibly some vendors will only accept food as a currency because it's more valuable than gold. I would probably combine this with a blanket ban on food/water creation spells (that somehow this drought is being magically caused and effects these spells as well, or at least that the amounts these spells gives are appropriately pitiful), which would also make it clear that the drought that is ravaging the land is somehow magical--and therefore potentially fixable--in nature. Food scarcity core mechanic of the game and a core element of the story, and, importantly, the problem doesn't have to disappear immediately as the players level up. Giving a story-based reason for the players to care about these sorts of mechanics will make it much easier for them to buy into them.
Regarding Encumbrance, I would add that party size matters. In a large group, there can be enough high-Str PCs that loads can be spread. But if enough PCs use Str as a dump stat, Encumbrance is a real danger, especially with three PCs or fewer. There's a good example of this in Esper The Bard's recent single-PC campaign, Trials of the Neophyte: ruclips.net/p/PL4lwwEJ-yFaJ23Bbp5HsWdbU7SMXolhuy. Survival and Encumbrance are taken seriously, and the PC has to make tough decisions about what gear to keep hold of.
I was just thinking, watching another of yours helpful videos - what is your wall made of, that you have pins in it? I mean I've heard jokes about USA walls, so is this it? You guys just have them so soft, that you can do it, or did you tinker it somehow?
I thought about this once, however when you create your level 1 character you are usually already almost double space limit of your 30 pound backpack...
The encumbrance mechanic isn't used as much because it's cumbersome to keep track of. When you spent a spellslot, reduce or gain hitpoints it just takes a second to note that down. But calculating and RE-calculating encumbrance is just awfully slow and tedious. If that process would be simpler more people would probably use it. Even if you would "hardcode" it: "You can only have 10 items and 500 coins/gems on you", it would be better. People would have to make tough choices. "Do I take a ration? Or a potion? Or a rope?" This not only drives drama - but also the PCs. Long trips need more rations. A lot more than they can carry. Hirelings and Packanimals are needed now. And now there's finally something you can spent your money on. Once the PCs are higher level, the might need a guarded storage space for all their gear. Why should they hoard their gear I hear you ask. That's the next thing - if D&D would have a more diverse weapon system for example, it could be useful to have couple of different weapons at hand. Just in case the next BBEG is immune to my piercing damage weapon. All in all I think it's not a problem with the mechanic or style of game. But a problem of the games overall design and interaction between mechanics. One mechanic needs to drive and support the other mechanic.
Random Encounter management is limited when you limit the number of rests possible per day. Too many people just let people long rest all the time without reading the rule: "A character can’t benefit from more than one Long Rest in a 24-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits." That means if you finish a long rest at 10am you technically can't benefit from another long rest until 10am the next day. This simple rule literally changes the entire way that people play the game. Like my players finished a long rest at 8am since they did a midnight raid on a camp. They wanted to do another midnight raid on another camp, but had to wait till 8am the following day to get the benefits of the full heal.... now throw some stuff at them in the middle of that day and suddenly they won't be at full when they set up for the next raid.
The reason why I don't really let my players keep track of ammunition and rations is that compared to the amount of gold a party earns it doesn't really matter if they spend gold on it or not. If you compare it to the material costs of spells it feels a bit strange to expect the party being able to get access to 100gp for Identify at some point in their early levels but then having to worry about buying arrows for 1gp per 20.
Not exactly fantasy but a lot of the three musketeers revolves around them trying to pay rent. When i track this kind of thing is the first piece of media that comes to mind.
Haven't watched the vid yet, but for my campaign my goal is to start with all of that in the low levels, and as we level and grow you'll get magic foci and goodberry and other stuff to get rid of the annoying rules.
i run an exploration-based B/X game with slot-based encumbrance. without encumbrance, an exploration-based game feels more like a theme park than a grand adventure.
When I DM, I very rarely use more than maybe one if I'm feeling fancy but I'm used to making my games more like jRPGs where you don't need to worry about ammo or encumbrance, since neither me or nor my players really care about the nitty gritty stuff.
Ammunition is the only one i require players to track rigorously. Magic components i require them to track only ones with a monetary cost, like a 500gp diamond, as for rations it assumed they buy them when the players say "we get ready to travel " and i tell them to take "x" amount of gold per player. Carrying capacity i take a commonsense approach if i think it is logical to put it in your pack or bag then i don't really care but if as they are looting a dungeon and the fighter grabs 2 suits of armor, 3 swords, 3 javelins ect then i will ask where are you putting all that? Obviously a Bag of Holding changes things. Expenses are handled with an "ok it's the first of the month your workers at your keep need to be paid so everyone take out $300 gold", or the players hire a steward and they leave them a treasury that they take the money out of and then the players or myself keeps track of the treasury. When it comes to random encounters i run a semi hexcrawl each square on the map is 8 miles if the players "fast travel" they move 3 squares a day and i roll 1 random encounter per square so the players can't go nova if they have a battle on the first or second square. if they choose to "explore" they move 1 square and they roll investigation, survival, perception checks and they might find a dungeon, a trading caravan, hunters, fishermen, monsters, bandits ect.
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A note about material components: in 5e, there's really no difference between an arcane focus and a bag of material components, You are not intended to track every twig, piece of thread, and bit of charcoal in the bag. You are only supposed to track components that have a gold cost, such as diamonds or expensive inks. The same is true of your arcane focus. So you are hand waving the components either way, the only thing you have to track is components with a material cost.
Exactly. It's all about character flavour. Choosing one over the other doesn't change the mechanics in 5e.
But why waste ink on the components without material costs? Then just leave it out completely, except for the ones where you have to spent gold.
I did a travel montage for a week in the jungle. Checked in with my players. They'd agreed we didn't want 6 months of real time games to get across a dangerous jungle, but wanted to feel the danger and length of journey. So just for that session, they could only take short rests and not long rests, until the people they were escorting got to the destination. It represented the daily attrition from trying to use resources, getting more worn down by the end of each succesive day. As a concession they could switch put prepared spells on a short rest during the session. Worked even though the week only yielded 3 encounters.
As a player, I hold myself to most of these even if the DM does not require it. I have found ways to use it to cause some shinanagians in my favor, not at the detriment of the table though.
As a DM, I use most of these. Encumbrance is more of a "have you hit your max" type of thing, but I don't enforce it traditionally. I will calculate the weight they have on my own out of the session, and then will happen to find a weight based trap. I don't tell them to track encumbrance, I get them to tell themselves that.
I have them track ammo as they can be used more than just for ranged attacks. A crafting material to make flaming arrows? Sling bullets can be used as a large ball bearing to check for traps. And the loot from enemies can make players want that random bandit attack to restock ammo. If they don't want to track magic items, you can always homebrew a quiver of plenty that gives endless arrows, or the like.
Players don't pay attention to what the characters are eating. The bland food of is the same to them as royal feast on the level of food. I don't just encourage rations, I encourage cooking. The type of food by living style (poor, modest, ect.) can give a bonus I made for it. Rations count as a poor meal; it fills you, but does little else. A good soup and bread is modest and I let them get +1 healing on short rests if they eat modest meals at least twice a day. I got them hunting for food and foraging for ingredients to try and make the cooking checks to increase meal quality at every camp.
Rent for inns isn't an issue, it is that or camping. Living expenses for downtime cover the other part, so there has been no issue there.
Random encounters I have are based on the area. Animals even wolves would leave a group of adventurers alone. Bandits appear closer to roads, monsters further from civilization. And some of those random encounters will track the heroes to ambush them at camp.
I came up with some random encounter method that really works for my table. Recently I ran a more exploration based campaign where travel was an important component of the adventure. I get three players to roll a 1d12, 1d6, and 1d4. The 1d12 determines the behavior of the enemy, 1d6 determines a "complication", and the 1d4 determines the difficulty. My players are only aware of what the 1d4 does which I didn't intend at first, but it made or some really tense moments when the behavior is "ambush" and the encounter was max difficulty.
When I finish rolling I do one of three things. 1, Include a story relevant event that matches the roll that I was already going to include at some point. 2, I run a small pre-planned, pre-balanced encounter that again matches the roll, 3 Use an online generator to get an assortment of monsters for whatever difficulty they rolled.
This actually ends up being a fun exercise in improv because when I get a random monster cluster I have to come up with a reason why they are there in the first place and set a convincing scene. I found this often results in a ton more social encounters , stealth missions, and dramatic escapes all during a part of the session I did little to no prep for.
This campaign was the first time I tried out random encounters but my players pretty much universally liked them. They do mess up pacing sometimes, but all in all they are a great way to bring a since of scale to a world during longer travel sequences.
Thats awesome
For random encounters, I think Ginny Di has the best suggestion. On a 3 day journey, they come across a nobleman's cart that's been attacked by bandits. On day 2 they have a minor encounter with the bandits and maybe get some exposition about the nearby area from the nobleman. On day 3, they go to the bandit camp and clean house. When they enter the city, they've got the endorsement of this noble, a decent amount of knowledge about the city, and although he couldn't give them any gold, they've always got a place to stay at the nobleman's manor, free of charge.
I think people overthink the "random" part. In my Homebrew game I never do "random" encounters, but I do plan travel encounters that advance the overall plot in some way.
@@ArekesuLive That's definitely a valid way to do it, but I think the value of random encounters in the right style of game (outside of just challenge and more combat, where it's aimed at doing that) is to maintain the feel of a world that isn't entirely about you, or entirely about the overall plot because a 'real' world doesn't have an overall plot. Sometimes bandits attack because you exist in a world where there are bandits, and it's not at all because the bandits are secretly working for the corrupt nobleman your party is trying to bring down. So it's a question of taste, do you want a story that's kind of cinematic in the sense that everything that happens should be building toward a central plot, or do you want something more like the feeling of playing characters who live in a world that exists and does its thing without much regard for them.
This defeats the entire point of a random encounter.
If I’m putting together random encounters it’s because I explicitly didn’t plan for something to happen over the course of a journey, anything else categorically is not random.
If you have a *plan* for when and how the PCs are introduced to the situation that’s not really random.
@@porkupineexe6862 you must be fun at parties.
@@hellyeah6127 lol cope, I guess having reasoned and nice conversations just isn’t your speed.
The issue with these rules is that they are a legacy of older editions and older style of play.
Back in older editions (OD&D, the basic books, and AD&D 1e) gold, was the way one acquired experience, it was the main driving force of going in the dungeon and pulling it out.
Ammunition was easy to track because characters and sheet were simpler as well.
Rations and water are of course, important only when relevant when it comes to exploration and travel in the wilderness a style of play that also has been poorly explained and treated.
Which leads into, wilderness encounters. Wilderness encounters were dangerous and often treated with more caution because back then, you could encounter a dragon while traversing the wilderness regardless of level, not only that but PCs didn't heal like they do now (completely healing comes from 4e btw)
All these rules enforce a different narrative, a different style of play. One where the pace was slower and the world of The PC wasnt constantly on fire and the adventures of levels 1-15 last more than month and a half in game.
I feel that the tedium of resource management is one of those things that exists more as a boogie man than an actual issue. the negative press that has been thrown out there against it as well as things like slower healing, has really soured (poisoned?) a lot of minds against even considering it. A lot of people might enjoy them, if only they'd try them.
Some of my fondest memories of the game stem from when my character (and the party) were really down on our luck. Starving, out of arrows, running low on spell components and having to make those difficult (read as dramatic) decisions. That nail-biting feeling of counting your arrows down as you fight on through the adventure, far from town and hoping you can last. Spending time in camp trying to cobble together a few more arrows or foraging in the countryside for components. Risking your safety to get those expensive components when you were low on gold or not otherwise in a position to purchase them. Do you make that choice to be a thief, just to get the stuff you need to adventure? Do you take the bad deal or questionable job to make ends meet?
Even in heroic fantasy there is a place for this. It might even serve well to temper the super-heroism of 5E (which I play).
Adversity breeds drama and the best parts of our campaign came out of the decisions we had to make as much as those we chose to make. How many amazing scenes in movies, TV, and books occur for the want of something simple - money, rations, supplies, medicine, shelter - the list really does go on and on. Playing through these can be amazingly fun.
Oh, and encumbrance was about way more than transporting gold in earlier editions. You know this, I'm sure, but for those who might be familiar, you were not limited in how many magic items you could possess and there were few limitations on how many you could use simultaneously. Also, in the absence of so many class and racial abilities, FEATs and the like, what you had on you very much was what you could do. Encumbrance also helped rope in your character's abilities.
Different people have immersion broken in different ways. As someone who hikes and backpacks, not including encumbrance or travel rules throws me right out of the narrative. My 8 str wizard can walk 20 miles a day carrying 80 lbs of stuff?! Are you sure?!
What I have found is that encumbrance rules generally focuses the party on getting beasts of burden - which is a good gold sink and gives them precious pets to protect - and to really focus on what items they do and don't need. At higher levels magic can help solve this in a satisfying way.
Just my $0.02.
As a big-time backpacker earlier in life, this. Very much this. I tend to track encumbrance as a player even if the campaign as a whole doesn’t because it helps my immersion.
That's actually the experience I wanted from Minecraft -- lost while backpacking or from a crashed ship/plane/etc. What's the first thing you do in such a scenario? Sure isn't punching a tree or crafting a workbench. So I tried to get a mod made that'd let you craft more things in your inventory and find more baseline resources (like twigs) before you got to the workbench stage.
I feel similar about tabletops, but it's hard to find fellow players (of tabletops *or* of video games) who get the same engagement I get from the low-level survival side of things.
...also, our gaming group has had our horses lost or eaten so often that the thought of investing in horses is kinda laughable at this point. If you have them going into the adventure you sure won't have them on the way out (when they're more needed).
(Man, I miss hiking. It's been a while.)
Heard from the table, “I not here to role-play an accountant.” In 1E GP Weight for things was also use for how awkward things were. A spear weight more in GP Weight than a long sword. I did not used encumbrance back then until I got a real world example. I was in a costume wearing 3 + swords, I had trouble walking through a door without the sword hitting the wall. But after a while it wasn’t fun.
On rations and ammo, I don’t worry about it unless the story does. Like in Tomb of Annihilation. Currently material components are cheap. In fact Grand total cost of material components is 96,342 gp 3 sp 2 cp with the total of Consumed being 46,825 gp or 60,155 gp
Non consumed 31,187 gp 3 sp 2 cp
in my most recent campaign I tried tackling the problem of the value of gold. My solution was to make things for sale that the players would actually want, like homebrew potion recipes or upgrading weapons or offering training to the players to teach them a certain feat that were relatively expensive to average 5e items.
So far I would say that it's worked because now the party actively participate with these elements and have to make those tougher decisions of "who gets to upgrade their armor?" or the "no wait I wanna upgrade my sword and I wanna buy new armor instead!" and the "but we've been saving up to buy this furnished house" and such, which is really what I was looking for by implementing it this way.
Ticking clock’ is how we’ve always played, since the late 70’s, and it adds so much depth to the choices the player’s make. Random Encounters aren’t always, or even mostly, combat, rather they’re used to describe your world; environmental conditions, locations, NPC’s and evidence of monster passage all add depth to a session. Encumbrance is tough, but I ask every couple games, how much ‘free pounds’ does each character have. Great video.
There are some good ideas/systems out there for using die rolls to “track” different types of inventory. I believe the OSR book The Black Hack uses one of these systems. I’m going off (not so great) memory here, but You can have a ration die, quiver/ammo die, etc… basically the die size reflects how many of a thing you have (d20 for 20 arrows), after combat roll the ammo die. If you roll too low, you recover so few arrows that your ammo die drops from d20 to d12. If you find or buy more arrows, it can go back up. Or eventually it keeps shrinking and you run out of arrows. Or something like that… lol
I don't think it's a coincidence that these often-ignored rules are also just... The worst rules in the whole edition? Like it baffles me that 5e focused so heavily on bounded accuracy and small, easy to add numbers in combat, but then settled on an encumbrance system that involves multiplying your strength score by an amount so high it will rarely matter, and then having items that range from dozens of pounds to fractions of a pound and expecting in-person players to hand calculate this for weeks on end. It's a system so obtuse it begs to be ignored.
100%
So high it will very rarely matter? You've obviously never played in or had any interest in playing in a survival based game.
Your basic point is spot on though, the numbers are unreasonably high, an "average person" being able to carry 150lbs without being encumbered is nothing short of ridiculous. However, if you're playing a gritty survival based game (which is the only reason I imagine you'd want to consider half these rules) it's still not really all that much.
I'm not sure where they got those numbers. An average healthy and relatively athletic person should be able to carry only about half their bodyweight without being notably encumbered, IF that weight can be properly distributed (a nice hiking pack for example.) So that number should really be around 10 at the absolute most, and that's still being somewhat generous. The rest of the encumbrance rules are also silly. A backpack can only carry 30lbs, I'm pretty sure an average high schoolers backpack has more than that in it.
Yeah. I looked at that stuff, and promptly gave my players a bag of holding AND a portable hole (for the big stuff). I simply don't want to FUSS with that stuff, myself.
@@AuntLoopy123 and that's exactly they point of how pointless those mechanics are, they are so useless they even gave the DM a way to say "I don't care about this" Bag of Holding is the "Get out of jail" card of the encumbrance monopoly
Yes! Look at Pathfinder 2e’s encumbrance system. So much better. And not too hard to port over if you want to play with encumbrance.
to me it depends: for instance I usually dont care about rations but if the party is going to travel trough a desert, how much water they bring suddenly is relevant. If they are traveling in a stable region with roads and/or patrols, I use random encounter only if I have some story hook behind, but if they're traveling in an unknown/savage/dangerous region then random encounters of beasts/bandits/enemies will definitely happen. Encumbrance, as long they dont collect dozens of weapons/armours/other things, I don't care, otherwise there's a bag of holding for sale at a local townshop...
So much to say! Soooo much!
To avoid writing an essay, the difference is the style of game.
A heroic game really doesn't need any book keeping outside of maybe ammo.
Adventures should be about going far away, doing the thing, and getting back. The travel should matter, and there's almost no games where travel matters... or where downtime can happen. Rent only matters during downtime.
Random encounters meanwhile are ideal for sandboxes that are plot light. Plot heavy games which DM's pretend are perfection can't use random encounters well. Beer and pretzel games can.
Big fan of this video. I'm enjoying these ones that trend a little ramble-y, it helps to just hear the different ways to use the mechanics. I'm gonna use several things from this vid. Definitely "picking 2 mechanics" and making a point to integrate them
With the exception of ammunition there’s an excellent RPG called Torchbearer that handles these resources in a really fun and compelling way.
I know this is not even close to the powerfantasy of 5E or modern D&D but tracking such things can add a ton of fun to the game if done right. It needs the group to plan and to think about their next step on a different level. As someone who always played low fantasy games I (and my group) really enjoy the long term pay off of a very well-planned adventure/expedition. There are tons of good encumbrance systems you can just substitute in.
For encounters I usually go with what makes sense and I designed some "background clockworks" that keep the world alive and moving. Sure it is more work, but it makes the world feel real & with an inherent logic.
What resources are the players expected to keep track of in your games?
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I do think ammunition should matter because without them ranged weapons like bows and crossbows are a bit OP. having to track ammo nerfs them a bit.
Yeah. I gave my players actual tokens for each piece of ammunition (including thrown weapons like javelins). An unbroken toothpick is a javelin, and a half-toothpick is either an arrow or bolt, and quarter-toothpicks are bullets.
When they use one, they put it in front of them. At the end of the battle, they roll perception for how many they can FIND (based on a fraction of how many they actually shot), and then roll again, for how many are actually salvageable. Except for magical ammo, which is always consumed, if it hits its target, and always salvageable, if it missed. But, if they see an arrow shaft sticking out of a torso, they can try to pull it out, without destroying it. Why not? More math-rock fun.
I find that having the physical token helps a lot.
BUT! Don't let them place the tokens on the board during the battle, because then you have try to remember which one is whose, unless you color-code your toothpicks.
A resource die mechanic could make tracking those easier. Just use a die of a specific size. Every critfail (or whatever value) your die drops one increment down. Until you are out.
A perception check might give you back one increment after a battle.
But if i have say 50 arrows how long will that last me? easily 5-10 encounters.
If there's not weight or cost then you get players with hundreds of arrows.
I don't mind tracking any of these, honestly.
I think spell components add a nice flavor dimension to a spellcaster tossing a fireball - Liam O'Brien of Critical Role does a great job with this in Campaign 2 with his character Caleb Widogast. Makes casting the most basic spell more fun for the whole table.
Rent is a good necessity item to bring up that helps drain a character's pockets on a consistent basis - especially at lower levels & the party doesn't have a permanent base of operations. Also, prepaying rent, for example, to keep one's non-campaign necessary stuff safe in their room is a nice bit of world immersion for the players.
I am playing a ranged (bow) rogue right now & keep track of arrows as the adventure goes along. My DM has allowed my character to become a basic fletcher so that if I have time & materials I can offset my spent ammunition losses somewhat.
Random encounters can be meaningful by having more than one roll per campaign day & have the players roll for the encounter, if any. Again something the Critical Roll campaign's have done relatively well - sorry, bit of a CR fanboy. ;-)
As I am old enough to have played AD&D in the early 80s, rations make perfect sense to me & I have no issue accounting for them. As you stated, this really helps keep a ranger integral to a party's survival.
We just finished the Frostmaiden adventure & my son was playing a ranger and was rather disappointed that the DM didn't really play up the survival aspect of the campaign - especially as we got further along in the adventure. Just made his character shine a little less when they should have been vital for the party's success.
Finally, as a player of martial characters, I like encumbrance as it keeps STR from being a wasted ability score, excepting for to hit & damage with melee weapons & combat maneuvers. Encumbrance reduced my paladin's movement from 30' to 25' & his finding of the Boots of Springing & Striding was an important moment instead of being just another magic item in the rolled treasure. Would also keep it from becoming the complete dump stat in 5e that it seems to have become.
That said, I will play what my table wants to play but I do think the tracking of these resources can definitely add to the campaign's flavor.
I'm planning to run Out of the Abyss and a few of these rules (especially rations and material compinents) are essential to give the feeling of the survival game that the first part of the module wants to be.
My rulings at my table:
Encumbrance - track for stuff, not for coin, makes players make a choice about what they carry
Ammunition - I have the players keep track untill they're powerful/rich enough to reasonably always just have more
Rations - almost never consider it
Rent - never comes up enough to worry about, players either stay 1 night at a place or just camp somewhere
Material components - I encourage players to use and get them, if only for the roleplaying opportunities, but if a player doesn't want to engage in that it's an arcane focus. I always enforce components that cost money for balancing (revivify etc..)
Random encounters - i have the players roll a dice and tell me the number. That determines the encounter for the day, whatever that may be. I only ever ignore this on a particularly down session to throw some combat in that makes the players feel good again
Tracking gold, encumbrance, and other things can be fun. (At least for some players.)
I had a player hire two guards and buy a horse and wagon with the loot the party got from the first dungeon.
Every item that was in every encounter after that was taken and sold off or hoarded on the wagon. Furniture, weapons, potions, arrows, javelins.
He hired more guards, upgraded their equipment, and paid them well. He kept track of all of it in a binder or series of folders.
By the end of the game the player had a standing army. A tower home and a small business. All with notes to back it up.
What’s sort of funny is I’m running Neverland right now from Andrew Kolb’s book and all these things are like 50% of our play, but they all organically feel important in a Neverland setting… simple materials are coveted for whimsical reasons, like thimbles being kisses, or thread being needed for trinkets the Lost Boys make… we’re exploring an island so wild encounters are the majority of our encounters… and rations and water are of dire importance except for the two people in the party that happen to be kids, as they can imagine the food into existence… encumbrance is the only thing I take lightly, but I just ask reasonable questions like where are you packing it or how are you keeping these things on you, and if they have to ramble too long then they probably need to find a place to stash stuff and come back for it. For fun I also tell them they can’t carry infinite gold… anything over a couple hundred pieces is gonna be super heavy so they are trying to figure out if the island has some equivalent of banks now lol
Out of GeekyDeron's list I only tend to track rations, material components and SOMETIMES ammunition depending on the game, as long as I ask the players beforehand and get a unanimous "That's fine" from them.
I have ammo be a thing to encourage my players to investigate the bodies and environment from their previous combat. I find that it helps the newer players keep track of their inventory and abilities.
I don't DM and I know I'm probably in the minority with this opinion. But I feel like resource management should be a part of the game. I don't care for infinite arrows, I enjoy the moments when you run out and need a clever solution. As for the spell casting side, I do think it takes away from it a bit with the focus and I feel why that is why Spellcasters are often (at least in my experience) seen as strictly better than martials.
Also, I had a character with a strength score of 1 and that has been the only time encumbrance has really mattered, since he is one of 6 characters i have had playtime with. He was for a one shot and could not carry the starting equipment (he was a Kobold Sorcerer made before racial negatives were removed). I don't think an entire campaign with him would have went well but he was loads of fun for that one shot.
I also don't really have a lot of experience with different characters but they have all been strong enough to carry what they had on them plus some - especially my barbarian, my longest run character - still going strong
I think infinite ammo should be a magic item, either a magical quiver that replenishes or clones what you have in there (make an exception for magical arrows or dragons will be easy encounters) or a bow similar to Immortals that generates its own arrows. The latter should be a quest item (not a drop but its own quest) but the quiver could be a purchase item or random drop. That gives the DM a little more control over when the character get infinite ammo.
As for spell casters, Wizards already have so much drain on their resources that components shouldn't be, up to a point. They have to buy paper and ink at 100gp/spell level, unless it's their school, then track how much they've used vs the spells they want to copy. Adding the spell components to that seems a bit overboard unless you really enjoy crunching numbers at your table.
@@narvalin5905 I like the idea for the bow and/or quiver. Definitely a good magic item.
Forgive me if I misunderstood the rules (I've never played as or with a wizard), but I thought Wizards paid that when getting spells outside of leveling and such, which would be reasonable expenses for extra power - though if I'm wrong that makes wizards way more expensive than I thought. Though it doesn't address the other casters, I'd definitely see the benefit of not being too hard on it there - except for like a moment where it's like you're stripped of all possessions and you can find makeshift stuff. Like the fighter gets a rock or stick and the rogue sharpens a piece of flint and the casters scrounge up some supplies, and everyone shows that they are more than their equipment. Ending with them recovering their items and such.
@@TourFaint If you are spending your money on arrows and rations then you are interacting with the mechanic. And if you are carrying 200 arrows without something like a bag of holding you are going to be very uncomfortable -since a quiver holds 20, 10 quivers strapped all over your body sounds honestly both frightening and goofy. And I'm not saying go nitty gritty or anything but just a bit can add stuff that simply throwing out these mechanics can't have
@@TourFaint I mean if you ignore that your character actually has to carry all of these arrows then sure you aren't interacting much, but by you having to say you are going to the store you are by definition interacting with the mechanic, maybe not much but you are doing it. But it seems you are only looking to shoot down the idea instead of actually entertaining the idea that it doesn't have to be all bad
As a character with an 8 STR, a bag of holding and who constantly mentions performing their trade while on the road to ensure they always have something to sell back in the town, while having 3 spell slots and being yet to run out, I feel this. So much.
I'm personally a huge fan of encumbrance and keeping careful track of not only how much your character is carrying, but *where* they're carrying it. Not because I want the crunchy numbers, but because I think it adds to the immersion of the roleplaying experience.
After all, your Wizard can't carry as much as the fighter, so he or she has to prioritize what they want to carry more. Do they take along that fascinating book they found? Or do they bring food? Do they buy a mule, and then have to pick and choose what they take in when they enter a dungeon? And who cares for the mule when they're in there? If they want to load their pack down with goodies then drop it in combat to move around more easily, go for it: but know what was in the pack, and what wasn't.
I think these kinds of things give a lot of really fun opportunity to flesh out a character. I don't tend to do massive gold rewards, or massive magic hauls, so players rarely have to worry about sacrificing "valuable" loot due to weight... but I do like my players to consider, say, whether or not they have dry clothes if they're going into cold and damp regions, or whether they'll be eating cooked or raw food when they camp due to a lack of preparation. What they choose says a lot about the attitude their characters take to adventuring, and what that player themself is likely to prioritize in the experience.
That said, I don't nickel and dime them. I stick by the manual's statement that you only track uses of spellcasting components with named values, I tend to be very lax on actually tracking usage of foodstuffs (especially if they have anyone in their party who can hunt and are in an area that's an option,) etc. I won't make them sacrifice X feet of rope each time they use it for something.
It's all part of the worldbuilding to me: the players understanding that they are part of the world they're in.
I’m about to run a fallout style campaign and I’m unsure of the other options but I’m definitely going to have the players track ammo because I feel like committing to that system adds to the atmosphere of my world.
as a player i have always kept track of these because i find it really fun, and as a ranger i specifically go out of my way to forage for my rations when i run out, instead of using goodberry because thats wasting spellslots i need for hunter's mark. Its simply fun for me to track stuff like that.
If you want to avoid the "One random encounter each day of travel, so we might as well go all out each time," routine, you can roll a d4 every morning, to determine how many times you will roll on the encounter table.
Alternately, make a LONGER table, with plenty of empty spaces, where nothing will happen.
Or BOTH.
TELL YOUR PLAYERS what you are doing, so that they know that they may, or may not, have up to 4 encounters, every day.
Of course, not all encounters need to be combat. You could simply meet an interesting NPC, or find an abandoned farmhouse, or come across a REALLY PICTURESQUE SCENE, that makes them stop and smell the roses. OR maybe enchanted roses, and they have to make wisdom saving throws not to fall into a hypnotic trance, or whatever. It doesn't all have to be combat.
Of course, there's always a chance you'll roll NOTHING, four times in a row, and have an uneventful day. But those are good, sometimes, too, right?
I improve random encounters by doing a bunch of dicerolls to kinda narrow down, and just improvise some story, often times narrating it something relating to one of the characters in the party. I roll a 1d4 to decide is it a monster, a random event, a story beat, or just an average day and nothing big happens. Let's go story beat. One of my players is playign a vengeance paladin- he used to wory as a bodyguard in a distant city called "The Menagerie" and it was an underground front for a sect of Bhaalists. They were basically using him as their main tool to violence so they could dodge legal consequence. Every once in a while he may find a caravan of one of those cultists trying to get them back- basically a "you're being hunted" deal. The players love it every time. And don't be afraid to have a giant eagle lay an egg while flying over and when it lands on a player you say "I suppose that's your rations covered for the day"
It's an incredibly underrated tool to give players personalized story in little bite-sized nuggets.
Then I hand;t rent, but it's come in a weird state that my players got lucky and bought homes in a capital city straight up, one owns a restaurant, and they have a bastion on the plane of water so.. well that isn't a thing for them? Ah well, they at least thought about it early.
I use the normal rules for components, basically if you use a focus you only need components for certain spells that require expensive components. Rations are really great since I like to run a lot of travel time and exploration, for rent I just have them state how long they stay and pay up front, ammunition depends, for arrows they can collect all arrows that actually hit enemies but only half that miss barring special circumstances, which helps mitigate restocking problems, and I only ever do random encounters after a large story encounter that wore the party down a bit. This way even these small encounters can feel very tense and gratifying when survived. And as for encumbrance, this depends. I use it for my current campaign only because I have a player that likes to hoard and having her realize suddenly that her hoarding is a problem that bogs her down in combat ended with a short roleplay moment where she spoke to the other characters, apologized for hoarding everything, and started actually sharing some of what she had. Though it was only the bare minimum, I still thought this was a nice character development moment. This is the only type of circumstance where encumbrance should be used imo.
I usually added random encounters at the end of a session when you don't have enough time to get into a combat that I have planned out. Expecting that boss fight to take to long but seeding in a smaller fight which should fit what time we have left. it also usually good because then they don't feel like any more then a short rest is good between them.
There also adding them when the PCs rest. Random rolls at that point adds tension because they lower on resources. I have different to choose from to make sure it just right for what they have left.
When DMing I found two of resources is the way to go but I usually do three.
Arrows and spell components are one because they usually it covers almost all the character that way. They just spend the gold for the arrows on the honor system and we agree how many they can hold or if others have quiver on other characters just to refill someone supply in the dungeon. Small spell needs are the same way, but the expensive or rare I ask them to do between sessions and we text in case there some issue. I only limit it if they don't have the gold or just would not make sense they can get that where they are.
Optional one is this. I only track encumbrance if using D&D Beyond since the system does it for us. I add the gold weight in. Normally I don't care except I felt like I had to enforce it because 4 Str character with heavy armor. There also the Dragon hoard situation. There should be so much gold that there no way they can get it home. I had the argument where players insist they could carry it all. This fixed that.
I track time. I give them time sensitive quests. Sometime I give them multiple. Then they might have to choose do we save this person who important to one or two of us or track the cultist that we know has the item they wanted. When they are not under any perceived time limits I just remind the players there might be a time limit you are unaware of. I usually do this when they keep trying to long rest way to often. It seems to do the trick after having dealt with other time sensitive quests. They realize they might not know what changing but something is changing. After the fight I might peel back the curtain a little just so they understand what changed. Usually motivates them to stay on a reasonable time frame.
Despite never having an issue personally with tracking ammo (just keep a note within your inventory, y'all), I think a faster way to do things is to just have a set amount of ammunition that is approximately "spent" per encounter, and have the players pay to "restock" at each shopping event, based on how many encounters you went through since you last restocked.
For example:
James the archer fought in 5 encounters, and harvested arrows after one of them. If your standard ammo number is 20, then James needs to restock 4.5*20=90 arrows, at 5 copper per arrow. 90*5= 450 copper, or 4.5 gold to restock after 4.5 battles worth of arrow loss.
Encumbrance is dead, and the Bag of Holding killed it.
One of the biggest problems with D&D and RPGs in general is the casual or cavalier way in which wealth is treated, considering that the archetype of fantasy is the medieval period. In medieval England, for example a gold mancus (copied from the Islamic dinar) was about 20 mm in diameter and contained about 4.25 grams of gold. This is roughly equivalent to the size of a US nickel coin. A mancus was said to be worth a month's earnings for a skilled craftsperson, so 100 gp is over 8 years' of income for a middle class person. D&D has PCs starting out with the equivalent of 50 gp in equipment, materiel, and coinage, a sum which would represent over 4 years' income. For a middle class person to be able to save 4 years' worth of income might take decades.
US nickels typically come in $2 rolls, or 40 coins. If you had 40 gp in a small belt pouch, you would be walking around with more money that most people in the world would ever see in one place at one time, and for a lot of people, more than all the money they would ever see in their lifetimes. And at today's prices (about $1750 USD/troy oz), 1 gp would be worth about $240 USD, so that "roll of nickels" would be equivalent to casually strolling about town with $9600 USD cash in your wallet.
That certainly gives you a bit more perspective that might help inform a DM and PCs about how realistic economies might function in a fantasy setting. it would be quite easy to put 100 g worth of gold coins in a belt pouch, but it could cost you our life if anyone finds out what's in there.
I would love to play in a game that you are describing! The more immersion the better in my mind, if I'm a player. But I agree, if I'm running a game, I try to make sure it includes what everyone wants.
Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars RPG handles ammunition by not requring players track it, but letting the GM say they run out of ammo for the weapon used if they roll a Despair, which can happen on a successful roll (even one that also has a Triumph). And when ammo runs out a weapon needs to be recharged/reloaded either by using a (reasonably cheap) consumable item or automatically during downtime (ie. resting for an evening or while travelling between planets). I really like that approach, but you'd have to change some details for a fantasy setting where the only ammo is arrows.
To me Encumbrance generally only matters when selecting basic loadout and when figuring out whether a character can carry extra stuff to camp/base/transport. And that's usually something like: Standard loadout is x, new items are y, is x + y < encumbrance?
To me Rations are only important in harsh environments when food can be scarce. And Rent needs to be a dramatic focus for it to matter. Material components can be a tool to make the magic of a setting feel different, but most of the time I'd rather just limit them to special spells.
I've had pretty poor experiences with some of these mechanics as a player when a DM implemented all of them but then never gave us the option to find a workable solution (example: tracking ammunition but punting us from dungeon to dungeon so there was NEVER a chance to buy arrows). This definitely colored my approach when I began DMing.
As a DM I'm a stickler about components with a financial value, but for the rest, either players use a focus, or, if they WANT components, I assume they pick the free ones up as they go and use them for flavor (like Liam did in CR season 2). I hate encumbrance SO MUCH that I hand out bags of holding very early on. I do ask about rations and food (for characters and even their pets/mounts) but I make acquiring it relatively easy and reward players who think about it unprompted (someone went to buy apples for the horses? I might offer inspiration or just do something special for that player with the animals themselves, since it's almost always an animal lover who thinks of this in game). For random encounters, I occasionally throw in more than one a day and/or have waves to the encounter so players need to budget their resources a bit. I'll admit to never tracking ammo because I'm apparently still traumatized by that old campaign that ended ages ago. 😂 I've honestly never considered rent as most of my parties live on the road, but I do make them pay for inns, and in my one long term campaign they have use of a pirate ship and the captain will take them places, but in return they have to pay a tithe to the Plank King (campaign is set in Wildemount) from each adventure they compete and the players know this and save for it, which I guess is like rent?
Kinda late to be commenting, but I just started learning Pathfinder 2e and one thing that surprised me is that their rule of encumbrance is *much* simpler than 5e. Basically, instead of using weight, it uses "bulk" which is an abstraction that works with small whole numbers making it much easier to track. Even the rule for coins is simple: divide by a thousand rounding down and you get its bulk value.
I like the idea of managing arrows and rations. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but I like it. I don't think rations are as important most of the time, unless wilderness survival is a big part of your campaign (like trekking through a vast wilderness/desert). One rule I've thought about using to somewhat reduce the resource management, but still make it a financial aspect, is that whenever you get to town just charge the players for a new quiver of arrows (or other ammunition) and rations for however long they traveled. This keeps up the fiction that the characters are replenishing their stocks of equipment, but tones down the strict resource tracking.
The fit for the game definitely matters since not every game has a way to put these things into focus. My boyfriend runs a DC game and I highly doubt Dick Grayson had to worry about rent. For my dnd games, I try to accommodate but so have things matter. Every PC can have a bag of holding but if the bandits knock you out, that is literally all your stuff. I also put a body chart that shows that you can only have so many things "active" so people don't feel tempted to go to video game mode and toggle through all their weapons. Spell components tend to matter since there is always a spell they want to cast that they don't have access to and I have it be a side quest and they might have to get more than just the components. If my group wants a benefactor so they don't have to worry about money, well now you have to explain why that flaming eldritch sword was so important to the mission. They want that sword since they paid for it and they send something worse than murders: lawyers. The way I deal with random encounters is very much how would the wild actually act. On top of that, if they get closer to a dungeon, the increase in encounters could signal that they are going the right way. Rations tend to come into play when they want to go off the roads so no passing street vendors or rest stops to rest and eat at. Higher risk for higher reward though. It also plays into if they want to take a rest in a dungeon. I tie the idea of hit points to rations, which act as "health packs" of sorts. Your character has the ratings to stave of exhaustion and to use hit die. At least that's how I explain it. Ammunition can be flexed a bit but that enchanted crossbow might not be able to be further enchanted and it becomes more stressful when it gets lost or damaged. Can't just repair it like an ordinary crossbow. That's some of the ways I have adjusted things but still had consequences that hopefully capture the spirit of the rules.
I like this. I'm gearing up for a cursed forest type survival game I'm running in 5e, and I'm having a lot of thoughts about what mechanics are worth it.
HP as a resource is reflected in Hit Dice, which I think get critically under-utilized, ar least in the games I've ran. So I'm having 1hr of rest mean a choice: 1 hit die spent to heal, or 1 hit die regained. At least, I wanna try that out.
Rations and ammo seem the closest to what needs to be focused on to capture a survival-heavy game. But I have no experience with them. I don't know whether my players will wanna track them. Hard to say
Material components: The ones that have a cost or get consumed aside, making it so a lot of spells need material components also gives you a vector to de-power the wizard for a dramatic moment. Like... you can strip your wizard's gear and throw him in prison; then his options for escape are severely reduced; and he has several ways to overcome this challenge, ranging from just kind of dealing with it, to foraging his surroundings for things to use *as* material components. Whereas if you ignore the mechanic altogether, it's not so easy to just do that.
Encumbrance is kind of in a weird grey area. For a PC using the standard array or point buy, their encumbrance is going to be 120-300 pounds; which is high enough where you will *never* have to worry about whether you can carry all of the gear that you're expecting to actually use in an adventuring day. It's just for picking up loot, and like... that's not really what the game is about anymore. For the large part, it's mostly just there to ensure that the players don't try to do anything *too* stupid, like lugging a ballista they ripped off its mount around.
Ammo, rent, rations, and random encounters all sit in the same boat, as they serve as ticking clocks, or spinning plates. You can't just go out into the woods and comb every square inch for the Lost Temple of Azaza'toth because you need to eat, and might get mauled by wild turbobears. You can't just sit in town for the rest of forever because you'll need money to maintain your lifestyle eventually. Ammo is needed because without it, a ranged weapon is just straight-up a better option than a melee weapon all of the time (I mean, there's still the issue of cantrips that wizards can cast infinitely forever, and that aren't super hard for other classes to get ahold of, but that's a different kettle of fish). As an aside, is the loophole your thinking of for getting around rent like... having proficiency in artisans tools and getting a real job?
Finally, for random encounters; if your players are just blasting all of their resources because you only throw one random encounter at them a day, then just... don't do that. Make your random encounter roll more than once a day (I use 3, personally; morning, travel, night). Let them hit a random encounter the day-of, just before they get to their target location.
I always have my players track encumbrance rations and ammo. I love having monsters do night raids where they have stolen these items from the players because they didn’t put up anyone for a night watch. It might seem as a mean thing to do players but its is a great side quest for them. In the morning they have to make the decision if they want to try and track down who stole the stuff and how are they going to get it back.
I think that you kind of need to have several of the resource mechanics for them to matter.
If I don't need to track encumbrance I can just buy one million arrows and then I no longer need to worry about ammunition.
If I don't need to track arrows then they don't take up carrying capacity so I can suddenly carry more making encumbrance matter less. The same is true for all other things with weight like rations etc.
Even spells that remove or reduce the need for a resource are themselves resources and means that the character wont have other spells.
If you only have a few resource mechanics you just max them out and forget about them. If you have several it becomes a decision where you have to think about what you will need.
That being said, a lot of campaigns probably don't need resource management mechanics at all. And the more mechanics you have the more book keeping it is to keep track of them.
I always track time, rations, ammo, spell components and things like that. This is not opt-in at my table. I think it makes the game more immersive and makes spending and buying resources more meaningful. Its not difficult to do anyway and the players can get them easily enough so that its not a huge worry unless they're far from civilization, and that is good because it makes wilderness scarier. Encumbrance, I do track but I am pretty lenient on it. Their backpacks can be encumbered and the character can drop it and no longer be encumbered if a fight breaks out. So penalties only apply while they're traveling. And they have plenty of ways to make that a non-issue such as getting a carriage. I think dropping backpacks could be cool too since the players may have left some things in their backpack like a weapon they want to switch to, so they have to double-back to it, grab the weapon then return to the fight.
Check out the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks by Joe Dever. They’re freely available on Project Aon. In them, you do indeed track your rations, and there’s an ability you can choose which lets you hunt or forage in most areas to find food, but if you don’t have rations and can’t hunt, you’ll take damage. You also have a limited number of inventory slots, which simulates encumbrance tracking. Ammunition doesn’t really come up because the best weapon in the series is a sword. Maybe tracking these resources is more important in a small group.
Ooh I’ll have to look into it!
I’m seriously old-school. I track everything. But then I have played in campaigns where that was important.
A caravan guard makes less pay than an experienced tracker, so when there is a need for coin, there is always coin to be made.
Rent is never an issue for a Druid or ranger, because they’re perfectly comfortable avoiding cities. Food is rarely an issue, because that forage can feed you for multiple days from one time foraging. Encumbrance is their nightmare.
Smart players make their own hooks. The adventuring company charter in Cormyr was always a good one and it cost them a thousand gold pieces that no one had early on. A well-designed world puts those right out in plain sight.
The way I run random encounters is that I made a D12 table with 6 encounters like Matt Colville. I use them when they roll poorly on survival checks to navigate the wilderness and just choose them to be quick and fun and make the world feel alive. Some examples in the desert the game is in: quicksand, striges in a canyon cave, a lizard folk assassin etc
How I handle these things in campaigns I run:
1) material components; if you have your gear, you have a sufficient supply of trivial components (i.e.: no stated GP value). As a reminder, a spell focus doesn't replace components that have a listed cost
2) encumbrance as needed; are you making a cross-country trek, and need to haul something that has significant mass? Yes, your encumbrance will come into play
3) rent; yep, I have them pay for room and board if they're in a town. I don't do "lifestyle" stuff.
4) ammunition; simply put, yes, the PCs need to keep track
5) wealth; this also ties into encumbrance. There's a reason PCs like finding gems. Also dovetails into spell components
6) random encounters; yep, I use them. It's a bit more work in Roll20, but I do it. If I see the PCs always going nova because they are metagaming, thinking there's only going to be that one encounter, I will add others.
A possibly hot take; Rereading the King Killer Chronicles when you are older leads to the unfortunate realization that the lead character is basically the power fantasy of an awkward edgy teenage boy. For as widely regarded as the two books are, comparing it to something like a sitcom in terms of its simplistic but effective appeal isn't as much of a leap as youd think.
I really enjoy the style of play that manages these (though slot based encumbrance is the way to go. Check out Pathfinder 2e). But it’s super campaign and table dependent. In my 5e curse of Strahd game, we don’t track this at all and there are fewer wilderness encounters.
In my OSE sandbox game, we track all of this. I have found having a pile of glass beads representing food and water in front of you and removing them as they deplete takes the tracking load off of the players and keeps it visible to the table.
ALL random encounters should serve the narrative or the world and DON’T have to be combat encounters. You encounter pilgrims on their way north to the temple and can provide some hooks in that direction. You encounter desiccated corpses of a caravan and strange hoof prints nearby. They get some stuff off the caravan and now have a mystery in the world to solve if they want to.
They encounter bandits who are yelling about some aspect of faction conflict that the players haven’t encountered yet. If you tie random encounters to the world, factions, hooks, etc. they feel so much less random and boring.
So, it can be great! Or terrible! It just depends on the fiction and what the table wants.
My personal problem with encumbrance isn't the carrying capacity itself. That part's fine, usually. It almost never becomes a crippling issue (unless you roll a 6 and the only stat you can afford to have be that low is Strength…). The problem _I_ have is that the fantasy characters I'm interested in playing aren't the ones lugging massive backpacks around everywhere they go, even in fights! I'd much rather have a JRPG-style shared hammerspace inventory. Tracking ammo and even rations is fine, the problem I have ends up being with tracking what my character is carrying and where on their person they're carrying it, 'cause it interferes with the vision I have of my character. Basically, it's not the weight limit that's the issue, it's the fact that in order to have all the basic supplies for adventuring I have to carry around 60 pounds of stuff.
I play in a game where our DM encourages us to track these things but don't enforce it if we don't or just forget. Personally I really enjoy having to track all these things because it has led to some really fun rp moments. Like the time one of the other PCs decided to run away, but I knew he would be killed if he wasn't back before dawn. I already had enough exhaustion that I was at half speed, and I had managed to get ahold of the PC's sword which had been stolen. Carrying the sword put me over my carrying capacity so I was now encumbered and with the exhaustion I was at 1/4 speed. I'm "running" through the streets as fast as I can, dragging this massive sword behind me, plaintively calling for my friend trying to get them to come back. Eventually I find him but he refuses to go back, so for his own good I knock him out. Of course now I have the problem of how to get him back. I don't have any money, so I can't just pay the guards to just carry him for me, so I have to lie my ass off telling them that their boss wants this done. It was a very stressful moment, wondering if we were going to get back in time, which wouldn't have been a big deal at all without these "tedious" rules. So, Yes, I am a big fan of using and keeping track of all these things!
Make random encounters either matter or non combat related. Pretty soon I’m going to be running my players through a caravan style two weeks of travel. At several points I have a “planned random encounter” but I’m specifically pointing out the other guards are dying and at the week and a half point they stop at a roadhouse for days to replace them. Other things are going to happen at the roadhouse, but these “Random encounters” are what caused the caravan to stop for as long as they will.
i love resource management and wish the gaming community took it more seriously. i'm new to d&d but i'm very not new to the sims, and in the sims community ppl complain all the time about money being meaningless and how easily it is to get money. i play the sims a lot, and i NEVER use money cheats. when it comes to finances, i play the sims 4 as it's intended to be played, and i find getting money to be hard and stressful! it's a challenge to increase sims' wealth over time, and i find that challenge fun, so i get annoyed when other simmers whinge about the superfluity of money when they're using cheats to get it. i would love a d&d game where keeping track of resources is essential (the character i've never gotten to play is a girl who hoards money bc she's the only breadwinner for her family back home) and you've given me a lot to think about wrt the campaign i'm about to start running for my friends.
One compromise I've seen on encumbrance is just to handwave the weight of "standard equipment" - stuff they've become so accustomed to carrying/wearing that it no longer phases them. Focus the rule on stuff that's comparatively important - loot, hauling bodies, etc. Also, I tend to give coinage in weight not amounts. It reinforces how heavy coins can be & bypasses that amusing "did we really sit here and count out each individual coin?"
Ooh it would be fun to say “here’s how many pounds of coins you have” and then figure out/tell them the total when they count it up. I actually really like that…
I think all of these things are a lot easier to handle and more fun at lower levels a lv1 encounter has a lot less for both the DM and player to track so keeping up on ammo and spell components is a lot less tricky but as Matt Mercer pointed out to Vex theres a pint when they have enough flowing income that it’s safe to assume they can get all the supplies they need whenever. For the random encounters instead of just scaling them up to ridiculous levels I like moral quandaries like a broken down merchant who is selling to a criminal organization that the group is opposed to. They can help this innocent person or leave them alone in the wild to likely die and the criminals will be less supplied and maybe even hungry and tired when the players face them or they can help and therefore establish their enemies supply chain
Pathfinder 2e has these same issues. I enforce encombrandce because Paizo simplified it from actually needing to know the actual weight of things, and it is now tracked in bulk. Most characters can carry about 5 bulk. That is so much easier to track now, so I make the players track it. The other I track is time. I do this because I created a calendar for my setting and made it relavent in a campaign where time mattered. I leave the count of ammunition to my players, and never bring up food, material components, and so on. As for random encounters, I stopped using them ages ago. The reason being is that they never felt pertinent to the story. These days I plan an encounter and make it feel random, but I have no need to ensure an encounter appears in every session.
I've never actually rolled on a random encounter table. Usually I read what encounters the table suggests and then hardcode some of them into certain parts of the story/spots on the map where it actually makes narrative sense for that encounter to happen
When I’ve used random encounters, that’s usually the method I’ve been most happy with as well.
For making these a pressure you also need to work out at what assumed level they are overcoming that pressure because they do earn more usually as they level. So at level 5 is adventuring still a desperate struggle to earn enough to live or has it already just become that little nuisance that makes you a copper short for the new magic item you want? Because keeping resources meaningful throughout means either continually adding on new resource drains as they get stronger and richer or making rewards pretty flat no matter the level. For the later it might seem bad getting the same amount for clearing out a few goblins as for slaying an elder brain but it does incentivise moral choices. If they are strong enough to steal a dragon's hoard does it matter that it's a gold dragon that never bothered people? Do they help poor villagers in need or do they focus on jobs from wealthy merchants and nobles? Resources can even change. Food or water may not be tracked at the start, but as a drought moves in they become rapidly dwindling resources both for themselves and for communities.
I ignore most of these because they take too much time at the table, both to keep track off and for the players to accurately deal with. The pacing of any story is critical, and if the pace of play at your table gets too slow, it can really hurt the experience of the players. So no ammunition, rations, rent or wilderness encounters for me. (Encumbrance is done by DnD Beyond, I find spell components mechanically interesting, and I make explicit encounters for exploration.)
Personally, I think the main reason the resources don't matter is that you don't need them. Ammunition? Given you regain half of spend ammo, and given ranged combat is rather rare, most groups won't get empty quivers before reaching nearest pit stop. Encrumbance doesn't matter, because nobody really does gold hoards anymore. Gold doesn't matter, because with how the prices are set, and how the loot tables are made, you only need one bandit band per half year to make your ends meet.
To make these things matter, you don't need to make them the narrative focus of the story. You need to make them so that they will help to tell the story. For example, in Ironsworn, all these expendables are simply put under "Supply". You lose supply as outcome of being hit (broken equipment), enduring harsh conditions (e.g. spend water when traversing desert), or having to refill your quiver etc. Having no supply means you have penalties for your rolls. Suddenly, all the resources come back. Random encounter with a bear is suddenly a threat, because if it lands an attack, it might destroy your supplies for your trip. Lose enough arrows, and you suddenly have to decide whether you packed extra ammo, or food. And so on. The mechanic simply lends itself to being part of the combat, and thus story.
Also, important to mention is, that you don't lose your supply by simply camping. You are assumed of being capable of finding enough food and water to refill your suplly pack. Which, I feel, is another important aspect. You don't care for supplies, until they are dramatically important. Camping isn't. Losing your backpack as result of your clumsiness on the icy ledge? Is.
So, the only system I can really give any advice on is Random Encounters. My players seem really engaged in them, so I thought I'd share.
I bring up multiple different tables. Some have been scoured from the internet and some have been created from my own head. Sometimes, I'll have an idea of what I want to have happen already in my head too. Then, I'll have one of my players (randomly chosen) roll a 1d100. Then I'll see what the result is on each of the tables, and from there, I let my imagination run wild.
There's a pretty famous random encounter of a group coming across 2 arguing men outside of a dragon lair. If the men are too loud or can't be calmed, the dragon appears and it ends badly. Well, I rolled this up along with an encounter about finding a shrine and finding a shortcut. I also knew I wanted to plant a seed of the bigger threat going on in the world.
So, the party comes across the two arguing men. They are arguing because their village was burned down and one of them desperately wants revenge, and he believes the dragon did it. The dragon turns out to be a Copper Dragon (acid), so clearly not the culprit, and the party gets the chance to both tell the men this as well as make a friend of the dragon. The party goes to investigate the town where they then follow the trail of devastation to a burning forest to face a "random encounter" of magmin that were summoned by an known figure in red. They then return to the dragon who provides them with a shortcut home.
Bam, mashed together like 3 different random encounters, sprinkled in some overarching plot stuff, gave them a new ally, and also got them to change terrains for the next day of travel as they are now under a mountain. Wooo~
Random encounters, I see them as branching off points, stuff to inspire the DM. They're random, which makes them fun, but they don't have to be disjointed from the main narrative or serve no purpose. Sometimes they'll just be random - sometimes bears are just hungry and attack, yknow? - but they don't always have to be. Random encounters are a way to make the world feel alive and always shifting, and definitely a way to keep the players on their toes.
And don't stop at one! I meshed 3 random encounters into one in this description, obviously, but you can also see all 3 and then be like "Well, I guess the players are having a very busy day today >:) " and that's totally fine too and can breakup that idea of BLOW EVERYTHING!!! that comes with random encounters.
Dude! You just paraphrased Christ. I’ve never seen that in a D&D video.
Well done.
I find that with VTT, where you have something that calculate your encumbrance and ammo count, these mechanics stop being so encumbering to the fun. Instead they start to affect how much and what you get out of Dungeons/encounters. Some of us older role players stop using these two things because it became too hard to keep track of everything.
Ooh that’s a really good, interesting point… I’d love to try these in action with the digital system and see how much easier it feels
@@SupergeekMike Yeah I didn't realize it myself until I started using Foundry VTT, it does a lot of the tedious background stuff so it doesn't slow down the important stuff. There is one thing we gamers are, and it's lazy, lol. So anything that makes it easier to jump into the fun parts we're gonna take.
It seems like I'm in the minority in the hobby, but I actually really enjoy resource managing as a part of the game. I think they can be fun, or at least interesting, and I never quite "got" why people complain about them. Except for encumbrance when I was playing 5e, since that one is... well, for one I, like most people on this planet, don't know what a pound is. So I have no idea if the weight of an item makes sense or not. Plus, in 5e, I remember that it wasn't uncommon for my characters to start with more equipment that they can carry. Again, I have no idea if that makes sense since I don't know what a pound means. Now I play Pathfinder2e which has a much better system.
Ammunition and rations are really easy to manage, I'm specially left scratching my head at all the people that don't track ammunition (and I got a player get angry at me because I told him that I do track it). Also Legolas... does runs out of arrows... in the books. Or at least I remember a scene in which he has to scavenge for Uruk-hai arrows since he is running low after all that adventuring.
Rent, I think, is the easiest of those to manage (well, aside from random encounters, since that is all work for the GM), I actually never heard somebody complain about it.
Material components, if we are talking about the ones that can't be replaced by a material components pouch, should absolutely be tracked since most of those are supposed to act as limiters for casters. Assuming the players don't have infinite gold anyway.
Which brings me to the resource that encompass five of the six (and sometimes all six) of those enumerated in the twit: Gold. I think a big reason D&D5e players don't care about those resource management mechanics is because it doesn't matters. Again, I don't play 5e anymore so I might be very wrong here, but I can't remember a lot of thing I wanted to buy when I was playing 5e. There was plate mail and some spell foci, but that's about it. Meaning that, by level five or so you don't really have an use for cash anymore, and it just sits there. You don't have trouble carrying all your loot because you don't care about picking up loot, you don't care about your ammunition because you can just buy more than you could ever use, same for rations and rent. The only times I used to hoard money in 5e was when I wanted to buy a house or a ship, and those were character reasons that had little to do with the story. Otherwise I just forgot about it entirely.
What I do with random encounters. Is I go to the 1st principle of a random encouter is emersion. This means that the random encounter is firmly in the discovery not the combat fun/mode. This means that the combat mechanics are wholly inappropriate ( that is to say actively fun-dastroying) for this scene. Ideally if I have a group that trusts me enough. I will run it the way critical role g m runs a lot of the chase/escape scenes.
This alternate method still follows narratively but gives the players the appearance of control of a mechanic. It is one role for the person on watch. Then the players collectively decide their collective approach from stealth, diplomacy, combat, or creative. A net failure on this role leads to a second roll where their first option is eliminated and the option of flee is added. One failed group raw results and one scene for each role plus an additional seen resolving the issue. Two field group rolls precipitates a side quest session. Research failures and I pull out my three act (session) alternatives to t p k book. This is the world getting in the way and having an entirely separate interrupting story on your way somewhere.
P s I find the problem of having more gold than is useful as an artifact of ignoring these gold sinks. 1st sink being just because there's gold in the dungeon doesn't mean you can bring it back. The second is that realism rethere's expenses especially if you've got something like a stronghold. 3rd the increased expenditure adds to the spell slots in improving the fighter/caster balance problem. Fourth lead regular expenses of life are both a theme setting artifact and a gold sink. This is why having in game time not too terribly much slower than real time is so important. 5th lay if you accumulate too much gold anyway. That's the time to start working on a gold sink project. Strongholds being a classic example ball and that 1 creates an additional daily expense. Thanks but orders are an equivalent that does both end treatises are a repeatable sync sync that affects a characters standing in the world. I guess all of these generally are standing affecting long term downtime projects.
Resource management in Curse of Strahd is a tricky one. I have made them get creative carrying coin about though not super strict on the rues but managing their resources now they are actually in the castle has become tricky for them. Everywhere else they've been managing like everything is a random encounter (fight fight rest fight rest etc), and maybe that's on me, but resting is harder in the belly of the beast.
For random encounters and PCs gojng nova… just don’t have a long rest result in the PCs getting all their resources back… mainly HP. Especially in the wild (i.e. outside a comfy bed at an inn)
If we look to our Appendix N for inspiration "rent" was incredibly important to Conan or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Tolkien made a point of telling us Legolas collected arrows from the orc quivers to replenish his ammo along the way. And spell components being rare and wondrous for more powerful spells is a nice limiter on the spell use. Resurrection requires a diamond worth a large amount, how many diamonds are worth much? IF the worth was 50 million dollars american we have 8 choices worldwide on Earth that fit the bill.Getting one of them should be an adventure in itself. Encumberance should be given a nod to try and stop all characters from looking like a fully laden Nodwick. Not knowing any better a friend was carrying around a Howitzer in Call of C'thulu since it was the gun with the most damage.All of these rules give the grounding sense of realism to make the fantasy world work. Avoid the unlimited ammo six-shooter give motivation for some character to be there. Each of these rules should be considered before ignoring o
I’m going to say that my dm does not, to my knowledge, force us to strictly monitor our encumbrances unless we choose to. He has specifically not said to monitor coinage. Now for the rest, rent, ammunition, etc, he specifically does and food in particular is monitored because that is a tension in the module we use and is part of the story. As for random encounters, weirdly enough, because I am the ranger and I did choose a favored terrain and it is the main one of the campaign that we travel through….yeah there is low chances of issues. At most we are likely to run into blizzards which are a mechanic specific to the module and the story. There is a lot of fighting against the environment in the story of this module which is why our dm tracks this. He just doesn’t mess with encumbrance much because we actually don’t get to carry much, don’t earn a ton, and we play with a very small group which means it can be difficult to carry the amount of food and other supplies we need while spending so much time as we require in the wilderness. Sure, I am catch my own rations most times. But this is the Arctic which means, even with my bonuses from favored terrain, I’m not likely to find much and I risk more doing so as it takes time to do this, thus raising chances of being caught in a blizzard.
also along the line of resource management and costs are things like hirelings and feed for horses. I find that players these days don't even think of hiring people and never question how much it might cost to have crew with the party, be it some guy that owns a cart and horse to help with travel and carrying supplies and treasure or hiring a member of the thieves guild to pull a job either to get something for the party or to create a distraction on the other part of town.
Now with things like ships in spelljammer the option of crew and ship supplies and docking fee more viable.
and for games like Dark Sun that take place in a scorching wasteland where water and food can't just be found by looking in the woods as you travel, and thinking about the weight of a gallon of water per person a day for a 5 day journey between towns with no refill points along the way. That is a lot of a persons encumbrance, so do you get a pack animal? how much food and water will it need on the trip?
Anyone that has ever played a Bethesda RPG knows encumbrance and how little it matters because by the EIght, I will take all 500 kilograms of stuff that I have just looted to the nearby store even if it is the last thing I do. I've been playing Kingdome Come: Deliverance recently, and most of these mechanics actually come into play in some way in it, like, for instance, saving the game is (primarily but not exclusively) tied to a specific in-game consumable that is actually pretty pricey. Made the game a lot more interesting and engaging, to me. Random encounters, in particular, were a lot more of a whole encounter compared to an encounter in Skyrim. I think it's mainly a stakes concern since in Skyrim the player is virtually a god, and most encounters are an obvious "I'll take care of these guys and sell their stuff to the closest buyer," whereas in Kingdome Come, the character can barely hold a sword, let alone swing it with any competence.
I think that tying random encounters' flavor and the stakes related to them is what makes for compelling encounters at any stage of a story, though it definitely is hard to achieve when the players are virtual or in some cases literal gods. Making random encounters not strictly involve combat is a good way around that, I feel. Fallout 4 has some neat fluff encounters that are lore related and don't necessarily lead to combat and definitely give some color to the usual monotony of "never should have come here" style encounters.
In Kingdome Come, there was one particular encounter that I still keep thinking about because it was so cool and fun to navigate, where I was near-lost in a forest trying to find something, and I heard sounds of combat from up ahead, so I approached and saw two groups of well-armed combatants fighting one another, and since I'm carrying almost no arrows and melee combat is already very challenging (and also what are these 'health potions' people keep mentioning?), I immediately started seriously thinking about my options. Natural instinct was wanting to get in on the action but also worrying that they'd both turn on me given the option, or that they're perhaps officials of some sort that getting involved with will not be good for me. At some point, I realized that one of the groups wasn't hostile toward me at all and was most likely a group of guards, so I managed to find an angle of approach, and even then, with the enemy focus divided, I still nearly died because the other side was in-universe a far more capable combatant than I. When the dust settled I still came out with some good loot I need to haul and experience points, as well as a couple of wounds that I needed to tend to, but it was so much more of a whole experience than almost any random encounter I've had in a game before. The only thing I lacked was actually being able to converse with the guards and ask what was going on, and even that I think was the result of the "interactable" npc being dead. I'd personally take this kind of encounter over, say, random vertibirds crashing while supermutants and BoS members wildly fire lasers in my general direction, any time, even though both are pretty cool encounters.
There was somewhere I wanted to go with all this, but I kinda got lost in remembering the encounter and forgot it, but yeah. I feel that random encounters can and should be something to at least partly focus on, personally.
When I was a DM I told my players that they had one of two options to choose from (for ammunition)
1) Keep track of it.
2) Don't keep track of it & when you roll a nat 1 you are now out of ammo. Nobody can give you any. You now can't use the weapon until you go buy ammo.
Ooooh a very different approach but a fun solution
I don't run random encounters the way the game tells us to, but I _do_ use all of these rules, and I think it makes the game better.
My favorite character currently in a game I am playing is a Damphir. Who feeds of blood. He has a flask with 3 "meals" in it. That's it. So three days of safe eating before it starts to get worrisome.
I enjoy it in roleplaying as well. As both me as a player and as the character feel the Paranoia.
Nice!
I think the core issue that you hit on was that gold doesn't really matter. You get so much of it, and there's so little to spend it on that you actually need, that these mechanics are kind of rendered useless. If you care ammunition, say, but not about encumbrance, then your archer could just purchase 1000 arrows and that would at least theoretically be okay. Ditto with food or rent or whatever.
I think as a DM, if you really want to play with these mechanics, the best way probably is to really lean into them: Say, for example, your kingdom is set in the middle of a terrible drought and starvation is rampant. Food prices are wildly inflated to the point where food takes up a significant portion of the party's budget, if you can even find someone willing to sell it... Or perhaps they need to think carefully about how far they can travel or risk running out. The roads are unsafe because many wild beasts are becoming increasingly desperate and/or brigands are out trying to rob travelers for food supplies (or, if you want to go even darker with this line of reasoning, you can). Possibly some vendors will only accept food as a currency because it's more valuable than gold. I would probably combine this with a blanket ban on food/water creation spells (that somehow this drought is being magically caused and effects these spells as well, or at least that the amounts these spells gives are appropriately pitiful), which would also make it clear that the drought that is ravaging the land is somehow magical--and therefore potentially fixable--in nature. Food scarcity core mechanic of the game and a core element of the story, and, importantly, the problem doesn't have to disappear immediately as the players level up. Giving a story-based reason for the players to care about these sorts of mechanics will make it much easier for them to buy into them.
It funny that you mention Legolas because in the books he does run out of arrows several times.
Regarding Encumbrance, I would add that party size matters. In a large group, there can be enough high-Str PCs that loads can be spread. But if enough PCs use Str as a dump stat, Encumbrance is a real danger, especially with three PCs or fewer. There's a good example of this in Esper The Bard's recent single-PC campaign, Trials of the Neophyte: ruclips.net/p/PL4lwwEJ-yFaJ23Bbp5HsWdbU7SMXolhuy. Survival and Encumbrance are taken seriously, and the PC has to make tough decisions about what gear to keep hold of.
I was just thinking, watching another of yours helpful videos - what is your wall made of, that you have pins in it? I mean I've heard jokes about USA walls, so is this it? You guys just have them so soft, that you can do it, or did you tinker it somehow?
I thought about this once, however when you create your level 1 character you are usually already almost double space limit of your 30 pound backpack...
The encumbrance mechanic isn't used as much because it's cumbersome to keep track of.
When you spent a spellslot, reduce or gain hitpoints it just takes a second to note that down.
But calculating and RE-calculating encumbrance is just awfully slow and tedious. If that process would be simpler more people would probably use it.
Even if you would "hardcode" it: "You can only have 10 items and 500 coins/gems on you", it would be better. People would have to make tough choices. "Do I take a ration? Or a potion? Or a rope?"
This not only drives drama - but also the PCs. Long trips need more rations. A lot more than they can carry. Hirelings and Packanimals are needed now.
And now there's finally something you can spent your money on. Once the PCs are higher level, the might need a guarded storage space for all their gear.
Why should they hoard their gear I hear you ask. That's the next thing - if D&D would have a more diverse weapon system for example,
it could be useful to have couple of different weapons at hand. Just in case the next BBEG is immune to my piercing damage weapon.
All in all I think it's not a problem with the mechanic or style of game. But a problem of the games overall design and interaction between mechanics.
One mechanic needs to drive and support the other mechanic.
The only one I ignore is encumbrance. Rent, rations, ammunition and random encounters are the things I tend to stick to.
holdovers from a previous generation's style of playing games: gritty realism, wargames, etc when characters weren't expected to be heroic
Random Encounter management is limited when you limit the number of rests possible per day. Too many people just let people long rest all the time without reading the rule:
"A character can’t benefit from more than one Long Rest in a 24-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits." That means if you finish a long rest at 10am you technically can't benefit from another long rest until 10am the next day.
This simple rule literally changes the entire way that people play the game. Like my players finished a long rest at 8am since they did a midnight raid on a camp. They wanted to do another midnight raid on another camp, but had to wait till 8am the following day to get the benefits of the full heal.... now throw some stuff at them in the middle of that day and suddenly they won't be at full when they set up for the next raid.
The reason why I don't really let my players keep track of ammunition and rations is that compared to the amount of gold a party earns it doesn't really matter if they spend gold on it or not. If you compare it to the material costs of spells it feels a bit strange to expect the party being able to get access to 100gp for Identify at some point in their early levels but then having to worry about buying arrows for 1gp per 20.
"You don't voluntarily spend hit points"
*laughs/cries in blood hunter*
I know it's 3rd party, I just find that amusing
Not exactly fantasy but a lot of the three musketeers revolves around them trying to pay rent. When i track this kind of thing is the first piece of media that comes to mind.
Ooh I have that audiobook downloaded so once I listen to it, I’ll look for that detail! :)
Right now I don't make people teack arrows, but they can if they want. They only have to track the magic/silver/poison ones.
Haven't watched the vid yet, but for my campaign my goal is to start with all of that in the low levels, and as we level and grow you'll get magic foci and goodberry and other stuff to get rid of the annoying rules.
2:18 Um, actually, Legolas did run out of arrows during the battle of Helms Deep. Not that it made a huge difference. He was using his knives instead.
i run an exploration-based B/X game with slot-based encumbrance. without encumbrance, an exploration-based game feels more like a theme park than a grand adventure.
When I DM, I very rarely use more than maybe one if I'm feeling fancy but I'm used to making my games more like jRPGs where you don't need to worry about ammo or encumbrance, since neither me or nor my players really care about the nitty gritty stuff.
Gritty realism helps make these mechanism matters in my experience.
Ammunition is the only one i require players to track rigorously. Magic components i require them to track only ones with a monetary cost, like a 500gp diamond, as for rations it assumed they buy them when the players say "we get ready to travel " and i tell them to take "x" amount of gold per player. Carrying capacity i take a commonsense approach if i think it is logical to put it in your pack or bag then i don't really care but if as they are looting a dungeon and the fighter grabs 2 suits of armor, 3 swords, 3 javelins ect then i will ask where are you putting all that? Obviously a Bag of Holding changes things. Expenses are handled with an "ok it's the first of the month your workers at your keep need to be paid so everyone take out $300 gold", or the players hire a steward and they leave them a treasury that they take the money out of and then the players or myself keeps track of the treasury. When it comes to random encounters i run a semi hexcrawl each square on the map is 8 miles if the players "fast travel" they move 3 squares a day and i roll 1 random encounter per square so the players can't go nova if they have a battle on the first or second square. if they choose to "explore" they move 1 square and they roll investigation, survival, perception checks and they might find a dungeon, a trading caravan, hunters, fishermen, monsters, bandits ect.