I've recently been considering a sort of ecumbrance limit, but for magic items only. The idea was inspired by this quote from Rob Kuntz, talking about the time that he and Gary Gygax went and played in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign:
Dave Arneson was (and still is, for that matter) a grand DM. His toughness started at the onset of the adventure--Gary and myself were allowed to choose only three magical items each. Dave thought our item lists were over burgeoned with goodies. Robilar: +3 sword, Girdle of Storm Giant Strength, Boots of Flying; Mordenkainen: Staff of Power, Bracers of Protection AC2, Ring of Wizardry (doubled 4th and 5th level spells). We were each allowed to bring one curative potion in addition.A while back I mentioned on the OD&D boards that I've long thought that Arneson's on-the-fly decision would make a good rule of thumb for characters visiting from another campaign. But lately I've given serious consideration to using this concept as a strict rule for my next World of Cinder campaign.
Each PC can carry three magic items plus a single disposable item like a potion or scroll. That's all. If you have more magic items than that you have to leave the rest back home. When you find an item on an adventure you can temporarily go over the limit only until such time as an opportunity to drop an item becomes available.
But here's the flipside of this new limit: no more wimpy, boring magic items. No one in the setting owns a sword+1. We're talking Mjolnir and Excalibur level kickass, using the weirdest stuff in the 1st edition DMG and the gods' own gear in Gods, Demigods & Heroes and the artifacts in Eldritch Wizardry as the baseline for magic items. Only the most clever, lucky and/or mighty of NPCs would own magic items under this set-up. Back in June I blogged a bit about this approach to magic items. I talked up the concept a bit at Wednesday night's game and most of the players seemed willing to swap out the Christmas tree effect of many crappy magic toys for one or two awesome items of power.
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You could have some synergistic items take up only one spot when carried together. I’m thinking of the old gauntlets of ogre power + belt of giant strength + hammer of thunderbolts combo. (And the lasers from Space Munchkin) While the argument can certainly be made that such a combo should exhaust your three-item limit, it’d just make completing the collection that much cooler.
ReplyDeleteAt first it seemed a little bit too 4e for my liking, but the flipside makes it work.
ReplyDeleteAs for combos, I'd agree that combos are Rule of Cool and all, but I'd still be tempted to have them take up three "slots" (urgh).
Fantasy Craft combines this approach with a much broader set of player rewards. The same "currency" that you spend to have your warrior get his hands on a flaming sword can also be spent on things like a trusty animal companion, a set of contacts in the thieves guild, your own wizard's tower, or a minor noble title.
ReplyDeleteI like it, especially with the really tight limit of three items. The Fantasy Trip did this with five being the limit, I think (because uh magic auras interfere blah blah hey look, a dragon!), and I always liked it. But five isn't really a "magic number" like three is. Three feels just about right, plus it does make each item all the more special even when (potentially) multiplied by X PCs.
ReplyDeleteThe Fantasy Trip used five because Steve Jackson had read the Illuminatus Trilogy and got the rule of five from that.
ReplyDeleteAnd it TFT, each item (of those five) could itself have five powers, so you had 25 altogether. Compared to D&D (at the time, the early 80's), it worked.
But I think I like Jeff's system here better.
I'm about to start a second campaign and I am totally using this. I am all for any approach that doesn't make a +1 sword seem like mundane crapola. Magic swords are supposed to be a big deal, dammit!
ReplyDeleteI'll probably explain the limit in terms of "magical radiation" or something, where exposing yourself to too many magical auras has deleterious effects on your health.
An easier explanation would be that the arcane energy fields surrounding the items begin to cancel one another out, or produce unpredictable effects.
Sounds like the makings of a D30 chart.
Glad to know I'm not the only DM who ignores encumbrance rules in favor of just using common sense. I was beginning to feel a bit insecure in it, esp. since it's strictly enforced in the game where I'm a player.
ReplyDeleteThis magic items limit rule seems obvious now, though it might need a bit of tweeking. Generally we've always played that magic items weighed less in addition to their other magic abilities. I don't know why we started doing that in retrospect, since as a kid, where all of our characters went much more frequently from one DM's game to another's, it was reallyneeded. Some of those magic items lists were ridiculously long.
So straight away magic items should weigh just as much as their mundane counterparts. But perhaps they weigh MORE due to their magic, the exact opposite of what I’ve always assumed. Some kind of magic and mass formula to serve as a guideline? Or when carried but not being actively used, they become heavier than normal...just an accepted downside to magic that’s widely understood. After all, gold is sought after and valuable, and look how dense it is. Maybe there’s a universal law at play there somehow.
Bravo. This falls in line with my "every magic item should be ridiculous" philosophy. Anything that helps us begone with the pedestrian Fighter-With-Plus-Two-Everything is, if I am permitted to carry it, a plus in my book.
ReplyDeleteI dislike encumbrance rules when all they do is provide a movement rate, because generally I ignore movement rates, so in such systems I naturally ignore encumbrance.
ReplyDeleteI like encumbrance rules when they have an effect on something more interesting, like defense. Though I still prefer fairly abstract systems ("Heavy Armor has Encumbrance 3, Light Armor has Encumbrance 1") to detailed systems, because, frankly, detailed systems always seem to fail on every level ... they're not fun, they're not evocative, and they're not realistic (I remember a GURPS game where it dawned on me that I could get a better Dodge score by carrying 14 arrows instead of 20, and on that day my brain screamed out NO).
I prefer limiting magic items by making them odd :)
Cool post, Jeff.
ReplyDeleteWhen considering the 53 heroes in the AD&D Deities & Demigods Cyclopedia, here is the breakdown for how many magic items they have:
23 have no magic items.
17 have 1 magic item.
8 have 2 magic items.
2 have 3 magic items.
1 has 7 magic items.
1 has 9 magic items.
Circe has an undetermined number.
(Let's set aside Circe as too undefined to deal with here.)
The hero with 7 magic items and the hero with 9 magic items are both from the Finnish Mythos--the one mythos written by Robert J. Kuntz rather than by James Ward. So looking at the 50 "Wardian" heroes, they have no more than 3 magic items each.
That's cool.
I like to see a place for non-superheroes though. I like to see an Animated Rag of Cleaning or somesuch. It's an interesting idea, but it just seems funky. I hesitate to say it would be a dealbreaker for me as a player - but I certainly would think four or five times before joining the group.
ReplyDeleteOr I would simply play a character who was unable to use magic items period, and gained some ability to compensate for that. I'd opt out of the undesirable magic item restrictions by restricting myself completely.
That's absolutely a separate thing from encumbrance though. I use Delta's stone-weight system. Little things don't weigh anything. The encumbrance number is in single digits for almost everyone.
If your game doesn't deal with minutae like torches and 10' poles and how much food people brought, then encumbrance can be easily chucked because it's there mainly to create opportunity costs in nonmagical equipment.
If someone truly had enough magical equipment to worry about encumbrance, they'd likely have levitation or Bag of Holding style remedies.
So awesome.
ReplyDeleteMy inner meanie screams to make players drop extra magic items on the spot. Magical dissonance has nasty effects, you know.
Now I gotta figure out how to apply this to mundane equipment ...
I'm a fan of and in agreement with almost everything you post. But, not this. Of course you and I both know there's no problem with that.
ReplyDeleteIf I imposed any limit it wouldn't be hard and it wouldn't be known to the PC's. They'd have to figure it out after their items lose their power, mutate, disappear, attract magic eating blobs from beyond, etc. Part and parcel with keeping magic weird and unknowable.
I agree with the no "normal" magic items. In fact other than potions in my campaign all items are one of a kind. There is exactly one Ring of Flying, one Flamberge, one Staff of the Magi, etc.
I usually handwaved encumbrance rules away until one of my Rogue player with an 8 Strength decided to be a kleptomaniac.
ReplyDeleteI'm always in favor of fewer but more powerful magic items and this idea is simply great.
The Fantasy Trip actually only had a 5-item limit on active magic items or spells; scrolls or potions stored in a pack didn't count, plus some items were exceptions to the rule, so the real effect was another number to track in addition to encumbrance.
ReplyDeleteI'm not likely to use magic item encumbrance as a way to control magic items, mainly because I prefer to encourage one-shot items like potions and scrolls. I'd rather just simplify encumberance and use that to prevent the Christmas Tree effect. Oh, and I should pay more attention to bonus inflation; only let each item be worth 1 point, and reducing the bonus for stacked items.
I had an idea a couple weeks ago that might play well with this. The original writeup is over at: http://athornton.dreamwidth.org/3592.html
ReplyDeleteBasically, I was thinking about the Spear of Longinus. I mean, why is it such a big deal? It's stick with a pointy iron bit on the end that a bored first-level Fighting Man poked a criminal with to see if he was dead yet.
Which led me to: it's not that you can only hit demons with +3 weapons, but that a weapon becomes a +3 weapon because someone killed a demon with it. All magical weapons have stories and they all got that way because of what they slew. Naming the weapons and telling the story gives a very Dwarf Fortress vibe, which I think is a good thing.
This also makes it a very small step to all magic weapons having egos and agendae of their own... "Here I am, the blade that drank the blood of the Wyrm of Westmark, and you're using me to hack up goblins in a dank cave outside a podunk little keep? Really? Screw you, buddy."
Adam: a few years ago our group playtested a Russian fantasy game with that kind of approach and it worked well (specifically, there were mechanics for the PCs own stuff to become "legended" if they were used for sufficiently notable stuff).
ReplyDeleteSadly, due to the death of Ed Simbalist, the project ran into legal tangles from which it may never emerge ... but it was a good time :(
Yup, totally up with the idea of limited magic items. I grew up on a steady diet of LoTR (early 80's) so it took me a long time to get my ehad around the idea of magic items _not_ having a name (cf Sting, Anduril, Excalibur, Thorn etc.) Not that my weedy lvl 5 rogue didn't appreciate his dagger +1, just would have been more significant if it was 'the slayer' or somesuch.
ReplyDeleteYou could keep +1 swords and the like, but say that they're not magical.
ReplyDeleteSJR: I love the idea of the PC's own stuff becoming legendary. Any hints as to how that mechanic worked?
ReplyDeleteTies in my personal touchstone of "magic = awesome, awesome = magic" (pace Keith and Frank of Dungeonomicon fame).
ReplyDelete"You have a crystalline katana limned in flames and demon-forged armour with screaming faces and chaotic spiky bits, what more do you want?!"
I've always loved the underpowerd and strange magic items, so I have to disagree with this approach, but I can see it working in a different kind of game than I usually run. :)
ReplyDeleteAs for "all known encumbrance systems", well! Take a look at The Riddle of Steel: Encumbrance is judged by GM common sense, then mechanical effects are derived from which of four categories that falls into. "Carrying next to nothing", "carrying some stuff", "carrying a bunch", and "loaded down with lots of stuff" are pretty easy categories to adjudicate. The book even has pictures to illustrate those categories (with more serious names than I've used) as a help for calibrating one's common sense.
@d7 RoS, hah according to that artwork 95% of players I know are overburdened or above. Interesting how they include fatness with encumbrance. Loose that bear gut and be able to carry and extra sack of coins outta the dungeon!
ReplyDeleteJokes aside that's how encumbrance is done! A few rough categories that DM eyeballs characters into.
Nice! Although, personally, I'd tweak it a little...
ReplyDeleteCharacters can carry:
- As much mundane gear as the DM thinks is reasonable.
- up to 3 permanent magic items
- up to 3 one-use items
- 500 coins per Strength point.
If they exceed these limits, they are significantly hindered in movement and on all rolls involving movement.
But that's probably just me.
(Verification word: Coppr. The type of coin adventurers will want to avoid if there's an encumberance system in play...)
There's a great system for levelling up of magic items (and a good system for acquiring them, based on reputation, rather than cash) in Fantasy Craft by Crafty Games.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I dig the arbitrary approach of just saying "everybody gets one".
"Today I want to start out by unilaterally declaring that all known encumbrance rules are a pain in the ass -- no one in my game is ever asked to tally how much stuff they are carrying in order to determine their correct movement rate."
ReplyDeleteAmen, brutha! Although I've had to crack down on players who wanted to carry entire bandoliers of potions. Make 'em roll a save every time they get hit!
The easier answer, of course, is to limit the number of magic items you place in your adventures.
ReplyDeleteYou are, after all, the DM. If they have too many magic items, who is ultimately responsible?
The DM, for putting them there to be found.
If you did use encumbrance rules, you could say that magic items have an increasing 'weight', like the wearying effect of the ring in Lord of the Rings. For example if 1 item weighs X, 2 might weigh 3X, 3 might weigh 6X and so on.
ReplyDelete