This ain’t quite an Ask Angry and it ain’t quite a pile of Random Bullshit. It’s kind of both. But it’s also an experiment.
For each of the next few months, my goal is to put out two True Campaign Managery lessons and one Angry Hack. And that plan leaves me one piece of content short of my four-a-month pledge. I want to put Ask Angry on hold for a bit and I’ve piled up a little too much Bullshit lately, so I plan to invite members of my supporter community to tell me what to write.
I’ll probably be giving this up as a disaster by May.
Today’s topic wasn’t technically chosen by the community so much as it was sent to the Ask Angry mailbox by a member of the community. I’ve been sitting on it for two months. And it’s the inspiration for this You Pick the Topic plan. It’s a bit too much for me to handle in a thousand words as part of a mailbag, but it’s hard to call it a full article.
But the sender-inner of today’s question deserves an answer. Even though they’ve asked to be called Backpack Novice rather than have their identity revealed, I know exactly who they are. And the question followed several very interesting, protracted, back-and-forth discussions between the two of us on the issue.
It’s just a shame I have to give such a crap answer.
Why Do Players Suck at Tracking Inventory?
A few months ago, a supporter sent me this message that was one part rant and one part desperate plea…
My players will happily spend an hour of table time planning what they need for a dangerous journey, what they will leave behind, and who is carrying what. But then they fail to spend five minutes updating the inventories on their character sheets to reflect the choices they make. Even when they do update their sheets, they can’t seem to keep track of what they have versus what they have used up versus what they left in town. Why do my players suck at managing their inventories and how do we fix it?
I added that bit of emphasis at the end.
And, as a side note, I appreciate the phrasing. “How can we fix it?” That’s nice. Because we’re a team. I’m the guy who will tell you what you do and you’re the one who’ll actually do it. That’s teamwork.
Though the irony of my saying this will be lost on absolutely everyone except the person who sent it, I totally sympathize. I’ve dealt with the same shit. And I did solve it. Sort of. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I solved it in a clunky, crappy way and I relied heavily on the sort of bullying abuse that doesn’t fit everyone’s Game Mastering style as much as it does mine.
My point is, this ain’t a you thing. This ain’t just your players. It’s players. Players suck hard at tracking inventory. Even the ones who actually give a crap about equipment management and expedition planning. So how can we — as an awesome team of sexy gaming genius and in-the-gaming-trenches behind-the-screen grunt — fix it?
The first step is always to figure out why a thing is so.
This Isn’t About Inventory Tracking
Let me start with the patently obvious: this ain’t an inventory problem. It’s more general than that. Players don’t suck at tracking inventory; players suck at tracking. Inventory just happens to be a particularly giant pain-in-ass to track.
Consider that there’s no small number of players that piss and whine about having to track hit points. Especially between sessions. And the only reason more players don’t bitch about it is because it’s easy to do. There’s one number to track, it goes up, it goes down, and that’s it.
It’s the same with experience points. Players hate tracking them, but many will because it’s not that hard. But still, lots of players complain. Hell, lots of Game Masters complain about tracking XP. And that just proves the problem isn’t players, it’s people. And this is why everyone goes gaga for milestone leveling. “You found the thing; level up! You beat the boss; level up again! Yay!”
And take careful note, Whoosh, that I said milestone leveling just so you wouldn’t get your pretty little panties in a pinch. You’re welcome.
People hate math and paperwork. And tracking is math and paperwork. So this has always been a problem in the tabletop roleplaying gamespace. But, if you’ve been at this GMing thing for a while and you think the problem’s getting worse, you’re not wrong. Players have always sucked at tracking, but the suckage is trending upwards, and it’s approaching a critical suck mass.
I have seriously had players — plural — in the last five years tell me, “We should just start each session with full hit points because how the hell are we supposed to remember how many we had last week?” Seriously. Several human players have said basically that. To my face. Unironically. And I constantly have to remind players to deduct the gold they’ve spent or given away. Or to mark off the spell slots they’ve expended. And this ain’t an old man yells at cloud thing. Some of these players were adults. Some were adulter than me. And I’m no spring chicken.
Tracking Shit is So Last Decade
While there most definitely is one of those cultural-generational things at work, there’s more to it than that. As we hurtle, kicking and screaming into the future, taking notes and recording things is becoming kind of passe. It’s old-fashioned. Even though we all carry an electronic widget at all times with which we can easily make all sorts of notes, records, and reminders, most of us just… don’t. Ironically, we count more and more on our memories with each passing day. Or we’re willing to consign stuff to the memory hole.
If it’s important, I’ll remember; if I don’t remember, it wasn’t important.
It’s frigging hilarious how many apps we’ve got with ten thousand bells and whistles to do shit we could with a sticky note or a piece of paper or the comes-free-with-every-smart-device Notes and Reminders app. How many fancy-ass checklist apps and to-do list apps and grocery list apps have you downloaded? How many of them do you actually use?
And remember, this ain’t a kids these days thing. We’re all guilty of this shit. We’re all sucky note-takers. Our electronics have trained us not to take notes. And we’re trained so well that we keep inventing new electronic tools to fix the problem and then not using them.
That’s the tide you’re swimming against trying to get your players to track anything. People don’t track and they don’t track more and more every damned day.
But there’s more to this story…
You Mean You’re Supposed to Change Your Sheet?
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the humble Character Record Sheet. Can you imagine a more terrible way to keep track of a TTRPG character? Because I sure as hell can’t. Character sheets suck. And they always have.
Back in the once-upon-a-time day when all we had were Xerox copies and pencils, changing your character sheet was a pain in the ass. You literally had to rub a piece of rubber over the sheet to shred the top surface of the paper to remove the existing marks. Every few weeks, you had to recopy the entire damned thing because you’d erased straight through it or because there were so many smears and smudges that the thing was unreadable.
Eventually, we experienced the revelation that was scratch paper. That was a tiny, supplemental pad of paper on which you recorded the shit that changed frequently. You filled each page with indecipherable tick marks and contextless numbers and, when the page was full, you tore it off, trashed it, and started with a fresh page.
Tracking inventory this way was horrible. You accumulated these long lists of items and every one had to be written down. By hand. Often with little notes about what it was and what it did. It’s one thing to write 12 in a box labeled HP, but writing, green and white striped goblin gem, 0.1 pounds, in belt pouch got fucking tedious.
These days, most players don’t write their sheets out. They fill out electronic sheets and either print them out if they want a hard copy or just access them with a device. But printed sheets are even harder to change. Those printer marks are permanent. To update the sheet requires scratching shit out and scrawling margin notes and then updating and reprinting the sheet between sessions. And devices aren’t any less tedious to update or access. There’s always tabbing around to the right spot, then tapping in a field, then backspacing by tapping and then typing on a tiny keyboard and fighting with autocorrect and tapping and tapping and tapping. It’s easier to change shit in a device than on a printed sheet, but it takes three times as long to make every change.
So, you’re back to scratch paper and a pencil. But if you wanted to use a stick of wood-enshrouded carbon with a rubber nub for unpenciling to make hieroglyphs on the flesh of a dead tree, you wouldn’t have downloaded that PDF or paid for D&D Beyond.
And lest any of you freak the fuck out because I’m either being an anti-technology Luddite or else I’m abandoning my anti-electronic stance and thus removing my tacit justification for your blanket iThing ban at the table, note that I’m just speaking with unbiased objectivity here. And I’m also saying that all the options suck. Whether it’s a paper sheet or a printed sheet or an electronic app, it’s not dynamic. It’s not easy to update and change. They’re shitty tools. All of them.
And that’s a real problem. When you’ve got something people are already really disinclined to do and you make it hard to do it… what the hell do you think is going to happen?
Especially when there’s no carrot in the cake.
Who Doesn’t Love Cutting Their Own Switch
Now, people will do things they don’t want to do. And they’ll do them even if they’re hard to do. They just need a good reason. Unfortunately, most players don’t have a good incentive to track the shit TTRPGs demand they track.
Say you keep diligent track of all your equipment and its weight and encumbrance and where it’s all stored. Say you update it precisely every time you pick something up or put something down or use something up or lose something. What’s that information gonna get used for? Mostly, it’s used to tell you that your character is weighed down and suffering penalties. Or that your backpack is too full and now you’ve got to juggle gear around or just throw shit away to claim that gold idol. Or that you’re out of food or arrows. Or that you can’t get at your potion of healing without wasting an entire action digging it out.
What fun, am I right?
“But,” I can hear you saying, “that also tells you when you have useful tools. You get to record valuable treasures and magical items and new weapons and fun things like that.” And you’re not wrong except that none of that requires the actual, careful tracking that you’re trying to get your players to do. All they have to do to know what useful tools and fun weapons they’ve got is write that shit down one time.
Funnily enough, players will do that much. They will write down the stuff they start the game with. They will write down what treasures they’ve found. They’ve got no problem — mostly — doing that. What they won’t do is note weights and track item locations and cross off shit they’ve used or change quantities.
It’s easy to write a list of stuff. And to add more stuff. And there’s a payoff. But tracking the cost of carrying that shit and tracking it getting lost, broken, or used up… you see what I mean?
And do keep in mind that doing this shit during play means stopping play to do math and paperwork. No one wants to stop playing the fun game to do math and paperwork.
Modern D&D is also pretty blasé about equipment and money. Most players don’t use most of the shit they have in their packs. They don’t need to. Skill rolls cover everything and most GMs use what equipment there is mainly to grant advantage if a thing is had. So players barely pay attention to their money and equipment anyway. Which is one of the reasons that they often forget the useful consumables and specialized items they’re carrying when they’d be most useful.
Tracking Sucks
The point is, tracking everything sucks. People are disinclined to track shit on general principle. But the tools for tracking TTRPG characters suck and that’s true whether you’re using a paper sheet or a PDF or a dedicated app. And the payoff for tracking this shit is all penalties and punishment.
Inventory tracking is just the place where all those forces combine to create a total effing shit-storm of suckage. Nothing else feels as bad to track as inventory.
What Can We Do About Inventory Tracking?
First, understand that there’s nothing any of us can do to make people want to keep good records. Some people — like me — are meticulous trackers and spreadsheet makers by nature. It makes us feel powerful. In control. We’ll track anything we can because we’re totally bonkers. But most people aren’t like that and there’s nothing you can do about it.
So, whatever you do to solve the problem — other than just giving up and ignoring it — is going to get a bunch of groaning and whining and pissing and complaining.
Thus, the first step is to grow some thick skin and develop a parent voice and learn to say, “Because I’m the GM and I said so”. Actually, I guess that’s the second step. The first step is to run a good enough game that people will play it even if you use your parent voice and make them track inventory because you’re the GM and you said so.
Now, I noted above that people will do things they don’t want to do as long as they’re not painfully hard and as long as there’s a good incentive. But that incentive thing is tricky with inventory. Your first impulse might be some arbitrary, abstract bonus for a well-maintained backpack or some stupid bullshit like that. “You packed your gear so well, your speed increased by 5 feet and you get a bonus on Fatigue saves.” Don’t do that. You can’t hand out bonus cookies for every damned thing. They don’t work here. The default, unpenalized state of a human is “naked and carrying nothing.” Every pound of gear you strap to your body makes your life worse.
The point is, sometimes the incentive is just, “because those are the rules.” Or rather, “because if you don’t do it, you don’t get to play the game.” Sometimes, as a Game Master, you have to be a teacher and yell at your kids to do their homework. I now periodically remind my players between sessions to update their inventories. And I ask them about their encumbrance at the start of every session. And I check their lists myself. And if someone tries to use something that’s not listed or it’s buried in the bottom of someone else’s pack, I’m like, “Hell no. My records say that thing ain’t on your person.”
Once the players know you’re watching and you’re not cutting them any slack, they’ll do their homework. Provided they never suspect you’ve stopped watching.
Is that a bunch of work? Is it a chore? Hell yes! It’s a giant pain in the ass to review and print copies of everyone’s inventory and to remain remotely aware of it during gameplay. Welcome to Game Mastering, kiddo. Giant pain in the ass is the name of the game. Or at least the subtitle. The Dungeon Master’s Guide should have “300 pages of pain for your ass” on the title page. If this shit’s important enough to make your players track it, it’s important enough for you to review it. And, really, it’s fifteen minutes of work before each session for me.
So, the incentive for tracking inventory in my game is “not getting yelled at.” As incentives go, it kind of sucks, but it’s the best you can get without arbitrary, abstract, game mechanical horseshit. And I’m too good for that.
But this still leaves the biggest problem: tracking inventory is a giant pain in the ass. So you’ve got to do everything in your power to make it the least painful pain in any player’s ass that you can. And since the game’s tools for it are just kind of shit, you need to start by building a better tool.
I made this giant-ass Microsoft Excel workbook and I shoved up a shared cloud folder so all my players could get at it. I declared it the way for everyone to do the inventory thing. Every character — and every pack animal and every magical container and every town vault and every bedroom trunk — has a tab on which to track what’s carried, packed, or stored there. And the thing is chocked full of auto-calculations. The players just have to type in the names, quantities, and individual weights of items and it does the rest. I programmed it with everyone’s personal encumbrance levels so it could run out their speeds and penalties. And if the players flag stuff as either Worn or Carried, it’ll tell you your current speed and penalties when you’re carrying all your gear and when you’ve left your pack behind.
I added that last feature because the elf scout kept leaving his backpack behind to scout ahead. Which is smart. I didn’t add that feature because I added breakaway packs or let people freely drop their backpacks. Sorry, you can’t doff a backpack in six seconds. That’s just bullshit.
I also set the font and margin sizes and page layouts carefully so that I — or anyone — could hit Print and get a single-page inventory sheet for the character or container. That’s so I can easily print the inventory sheets myself for each game.
The point is that I built a tool that’s as easy as possible for the players to use. And I keep tweaking it as I discover new needs or new ways to streamline it. I did so by first figuring out what I needed the tool to do. What I wanted to get out of inventory tracking. At minimum. And once I had a sheet that did that, I worked to minimize the work the players had to do to make it all work. And that’s the key to getting people to do what they don’t want to. Demand nothing more than the absolute minimum and make it as easy as possible for people to do just that. However much work it takes you to get there.
But even with Angry’s Awesome Automated Inventory Tracker and even with me Angrily yelling at my players to use the damned thing, there were still a few required concessions. The biggest one was no tracking shit during gameplay. None of us — not even me — want play to grind to a screeching halt so we can play with a fancy spreadsheet. So my policy is this: unless something hugely, bigly ridiculous happens or else the party really has stopped to spend several hours juggling their equipment around, Encumbrance is set at the start of the session. If you start the game Weighted Down, that’s how you spend the game. If something worth adjusting that shit happens, I’ll fudge an adjustment. “If you’re going to carry that sack of gold coins, that’s gonna slow you down to Laboring,” or, “Carrying the wounded will slow the party to Crawling Along and you’ll be vulnerable if you get ambushed until you put them down.”
Could my players abuse that shit? Of course. Would they? No. And if they ever did, I could fix it by saying, “Hey, you’re abusing this shit. Stop.”
Problem solved.
Sadly, that’s the best — and only — answer I’ve got to the “what can we do?” question. I can’t even give specifics about the tool you should build. I have no idea why you think tracking this shit matters. And that means I have no idea what you minimally need from your tool and what minimal inputs you’ll need from your players. Figuring that shit out, by the by, is the first step. “Why does this matter,” you must ask, “and what must I absolutely have to get what matters?”
And I would end there, except…
Your Slot-Based Inventory Sheet Sucks
I know I’ve now set myself up for a dozen dumbasses to post their favorite alternative inventory sheets and encumbrance systems based on slots or stones or cumbersomeness scores or some other crap like that. And those dumbasses will be totally missing my point. I didn’t set out to build a better encumbrance system; I set out to get people to use the system I already had. And that was less about the sheet than the work I’m demanding from my players. My actual sheet looks pretty much just like the one on the character sheet. I did that on purpose. The automation and the output are what matters. Fill in just the stuff you have and it will tell you clearly and visibly and obviously exactly what speed and encumbrance level you’re at when you’re carrying your backpack and when you set it down. Moreover, that automation is actually less important than my cutting a deal with my players that if they spend ten minutes between sessions updating this nice, simple, accessible cloud sheet, I won’t make a big deal about it during gameplay except in rare circumstances.
This ain’t about building a better encumbrance system; it’s about doing what you must as a Game Master to get your players to do literally any kind of homework. It’s about how to solve the general problem. It’s about building tools and hitting people with sticks.
But if this were about building better encumbrance systems, your slot-based cumbersomeness sheet would suck. I guarantee it. Those tools are kludge fixes for surface problems. They don’t get anywhere near the real issue. That real issue doesn’t even involve the word encumbrance. If you think tracking encumbrance is the problem, it’s your brain that’s the problem.
But that’s a story for another time. Or maybe never.
I guess that’s up to the community.
Well I feel called out.
Fun fact, in the game I play in, I actually payed very close attention to carrying capacity and container capacity while making my character. We took yet another rest last night, I marked off another day of rations, and then said, “Welp, my character will have to go back to resupply after the next rest unless someone is willing to give them rations.” The party decided it was better to go back to town to resupply. Otherwise I think we’d have been wandering the labrynthine dungeon for many more sessions.
So how much to buy a copy of the tool you built? It sounds like just the thing, to me
The folks in the Live Q&A following the Proofreadaloud already asked. I’ll share it soon. I just need to make it fit for sharing. That said, it’s not a great tool because it’s for AD&D 2E. But I’d be happy to show it off.
How did you talk your players into trying 2A? My players are scared of it, but it’s my favorite system.
I don’t understand… I just said, “I want to run this, okay?” And they said, “Okay.”
I’ve played around in excel just enough to figure out that I’m a lot better off letting someone else build the spreadsheets, even though I’m sure I can figure it out with a bit of effort. I’m also sure that given the time and the budget, I could build a rocket ship and fly to the moon, but Elon Musk is already half way there, so to speak
Anecdote:
It only really works for a one-shot where you know what items are going to be around, but for one that I ran, I had all of the items represented by cards – I printed them up and put them in Magic card sleeves to make them less awful to handle than a pile of paper slips. It takes a lot of pre-session work to make the item cards up, but handing the card over to the player when they find the item provides a nice “ooh” moment for them.
This doesn’t solve the “tracking encumbrance” part, but it does solve the “who is carrying what and where” issue – whatever pile they’ve put the item in is where it is right now, since the physical card has to be somewhere.
Part of why this worked well was the characters started with no gear and they found a big pile of gear at the start of the session – so they were quickly able to divvy it up.
Card-based inventory solutions are very neat for very limited one shots. And they are very good for that. But they have a host of practical and efficiency problems that mount up very quickly over the course of any kind of campaign. So, you’re not wrong, but I would not recommend a card-based solution to anyone who plans to run more than a one-shot.
I find it curious that designers don’t measure force of sword strikes in Newtons and yet find ways to represent attack in an abstracted manner which creates comparable (if not richer) decision space for players. Yet inventory is often tracked in an oddly specific way that neither provides gamist decisions nor reflects the real-world packing sensibilities. When moving things over distances long and short, the weight is often the least of the problems, yet it’s often the only tracked parameter.
Do you mind going a bit more into what factors do matter more for moving things over distance?
Can we know why slot-based inventory systems suck? You have me curious.
Probably because it doesn’t really solve the thing that makes tracking inventory a pain. The issue with tracking inventory isn’t weight, it’s that tracking isn’t fun period, and players only do it when you make them or there’s a benefit.
Slot systems don’t change this or add a benefit, in best implementations they slightly streamline it and at worst they make it so much worse by adding way more item specific slot rules than anyone could ever be bothered to remember without referencing them every time.
Maybe there’s some other specific issue angry might illuminate with them, but if I had to guess I suspect this has more to do with that than anything.
Kind of a half truth there. The article addresses incentive. Ultimately Angry did just yell at his players, but he did in fact make the process easier via streamlining and automating the process (and obviating changes during play). So I don’t see why streamlining the way inventory works isn’t part of the solution, given that that was literally in fact what he did.
I think the point wasn’t that they sucked MORE than regular inventory sheets, just that they still sucked in general because the problem isn’t HOW inventory is tracked, it’s getting players to actually do it.
I am fortunate to have a table of players that really like the cubeventory sheets I made for them.
Right but wrong.
Yes, slot-based inventory sheets have all the same problems as all other tracking inventory systems. Swapping “slot” for “pound” or “bulkiness” or “coins” changes nothing. That part you got right.
But no, getting players to track it is not the problem.
I think there is a non-negligible trade off that comes with using differently sized units of granularity & physical accuracy vs. ease-of-mental-math.
There’s a certain level of commitment to any game in which you’re tracking possessions over any period of time, and in which their physical nature effects circumstances.
That’s super vague, but that’s kind of it? If you don’t like tracking things, then don’t play games in which you have things to track… Saying it’s too cumbersome to track whether you’re encumbered is admitting you don’t care whether your character can carry a horse on their back while fighting.
Much less most games don’t even require you to take off your pack to fight, or swim, etc.
But the other conceit here is that this, like basically every other mechanic in TTRPG’s, becomes about one of granularity and scale. Every mechanic in a game is a shorthand for tracking something referenced in real life. It’s not as if these worlds (in 2024), can actually exist at the level of detail of the real world.
And to be honest, all of the overly complex systems don’t necessarily convey complexity in outcome at the table.
There is no wrong or right answer (which is something Angry surely disagrees with). But also, the correct answer is what works for you and your game. And most people do find a middle ground.
Slots are in some ways too restrictive? And also very abstract and “gamey”. It doesn’t solve the problem of tracking, it’s just playing a different game. And then you have an extra mechanic of the largess of specific items to think about.
And then you can have weight limits, which is a different kind of tracking with it’s own issues and limitations and work.
And then you can not track, which comes with the added boon of absolute chaos and immersion-breaking scenarios.
I think the GM as the arbiter has to be aware of what’s in player’s inventories, and if they get too big, just tell them they need to offload stuff this session or they’ll face a penalty. It’s just common sense, and GM has the final say.
It can really be that simple. They can’t carry 5 swords while traveling like the Fellowship. It’s not about punishment, it’s about what’s realistic to your world.
Why am I still writing?
I think that honestly most of the friction comes from the fact that in lots of adventure stories what the audience gets to see of packing for the expedition is just “And then the quartermaster walked off to pack for the expedition, it took him three hours.” with no further reference to the supply situation or sign that anyone is thinking about it at all until some contrivance brings that fact that they’re out of some supply to light, pretty much always in a way that takes everyone by surprise. It doesn’t make me feel like Aragorn to pack my inventory super efficiently and then track it meticulously, it makes me feel like I’m working at an Amazon warehouse. We got Amazon warehouse right here.
Just for the weight part of the inventory problem: I liked original RuneQuest’s ENC system (I don’t know what encumberance system modern Runequest uses – maybe it’s the same).
A regular guy can carry maybe 10 ENC without being seriously slowed down. You gain extra ENC capacity for higher STR and CON.
A one-handed weapon is 1 ENC. A Shield is 2 ENC. Your armour might be 3 ENC for leather to 10 ENC for full plate. Most small items of treasure are 0 ENC.
This level of abstraction seems to work well. Players aren’t trying to remember how many pounds they’re carrying. Their ENC level doesn’t change much during a normal game. A PC’s ENC is just an integer with simple steps from 1 to 20, so it doesn’t carry anywhere near the cognitive load of weighing every item.
Players do have to concentrate on ENC when it comes to loadout, which becomes an interesting set of choices (heavier armour? or a 2 ENC crossbow?).
Unless I’m missing something, that system is functionally identical to a slot-based system, which are themselves the same as a coin- or lb.-based system, but at a lower resolution.
So, have you stopped using the Quantum Quiver (https://theangrygm.com/does-ammunition-matter/)? Because that was a really clever notion.
But it was also a slap patch fix to a crap system.
“We’ll track anything we can because we’re totally bonkers. But most people aren’t like that and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I was going to say, “…until we complete the DEVICE”, then I kept reading. 🙂 Instead, I’ll say that saying “Hey, you’re abusing this shit. Stop.” is a lost art that desperately needs to make a comeback.
Interesting. I built similar time saving tools for myself as a player, to make life easier for myself while playing other GM’s games. I quickly felt like I was the only one bothering keeping track of things, other players and GM alike.
Somehow it never occurred to me to—as a GM—make a version for the whole party focused on shit I want them to track. That’s brilliant. Even better, let them (generally) off the hook during the game and just have them use scratch to update the tracker in between sessions?! Fuck, this is quality actionable advice. Thank you thank you
I’ve largely settled into a mix of “common-sense” rulings at the table, and occasional audits of character/inventory sheets for inventory tracking.
Basically, in-session, we don’t pause to do the math, but if an already heavily-burdened character tries to grab the 50lb bag of loot, I’ll remind him that he’s carrying too much stuff to add another 50lbs, or if the party decides to take an entire chest full of stuff I’ll ask how they plan to actually carry it.
I do count in my own notes how many arrows get fired, spells get cast, days worth of rations/water gets consumed, etc. and remind my players to mark those off if I notice they didn’t. If I don’t notice they’re not tracking, and they try to fire the 21st arrow from their quiver of 20, then their character just now noticed that they ran out when the character did.
After sessions or between sessions, the actual math gets done, and I have them figure out what stuff is in what container and how much those containers weigh with all that stuff in it and so on. I audit the sheets between sessions every so often (usually just before they’ll be traveling to or from a location), mostly because half my table have convinced themselves that they can’t do basic math, and if I don’t check their homework they’ll try to get out of doing it.
For cases of them not adding things to their inventory sheets, if they’re not paying attention, or forget to write something down, or don’t rite it down when I tell them to, or they can’t remember who has it “but someone definitely took it”, those sorts of things. I basically just go with a policy of “If you didn’t write it on the sheet, your character didn’t take it. If no one wrote it on their sheet, no one took it. If you’re sure you wrote it down but can’t figure out where, then your character can’t find it either.”
Which has gotten their characters in trouble a few times.
Though usually they’re better about adding stuff than marking off things they’ve used.
I also remind my players that horses exist, as do pack saddles, and carts, and poor townspeople who will absolutely hang out in camp with the horses to keep them fed for a couple days while they go explore the dangerous dungeon if you offer to pay them what amounts to half a year’s pay for a few days of camping out in the woods half a mile or so outside of the cavern of chittering horrors.
So usually, it works out to them carrying only the stuff they actually think they’ll need into the adventure proper, and leaving their other junk outside with the horses and some hired camp guard or other. Which reduces how much weight they have to track mid-adventure, and gives them an extra NPC or two who might help carry stuff back to town, if they get some bonus pay out of it.
Link it please. So we can see it and copy what works for us.
Working on it. You’re not the first or only one to ask for it.
If players that piss and whine about having to track hit points, is it wrong to suggest they cant start the session at 0 hp instead?
More seriously, I think the existence of the Angry™ 2E Inventory Spreadsheet suggest that there is a need or market for a computer enhanced play aid that does not encroach on imagination with fancy graphics.
On the physical side of things, it seems like most character sheets are not designed to be tracking friendly. I might look at printing the form on the reverse of the sheet, like an engineering pad, so that erasing does not damage the print and moving frequently updated items like HP, XP, and readied consumable like ammo to an index card that could be replaced when worn out, without having to redo the whole sheet.
Lastly, when it comes to tracking unidentified items in a loot centrist game, my preference has always been short codes. Instead of wiring “green and white striped goblin gem” the GM would specify “gem (a2c94a),” and it could always be referenced later when appraised. In the case of the Angry™ like Spreadsheet, there could probably even be tab that listed the visual description of such mystery items and any player notes on them.
I think this is one area where digital character sheets – be that from a VTT or an excel sheet – can help, as they’re very good at tracking stuff and basic maths.
They also make it easy for me as DM to check that items players pick up have the correct weights e.g. when they pick up random junk or skin a beast.
That said, we’ve just switched from DDB to Foundry for our game, and in doing that I discovered that none of them were “carrying” their bags in DDB, and they were all heavily over the encumbrance limit, despite DDB confidently saying they were fine. So manual checks are good.
Would be interested in any other perspectives though.
Shockingly, I don’t disagree that electronic tools would be best in this case. But most digital character sheets are not great. I have a whole separate rant about that. I’ll share it someday.
Yes, not super happy with digital sheets myself, but I do like the ease of tracking stuff, and Foundry at least means I can customise them and aren’t limited to just what Hasbro put out.
We play what I guess is a “hybrid” game with VTT and digital sheets, but physical dice and little/no automation of the game. Trying to make the best use of the tools.
Look forwards to your thoughts on digital character sheets – and also if/how playing online affects the decision.
For number tracking with paper, a trick we used to use is to write out all the numbers from 1 to whatever along the side of a sheet of paper and stick a paperclip against the appropriate number. HP, arrows, rations, whatever…
Some of my observations on the topic of Encumbrance – especially from a D&D5e point of view:
– People think their carry capacity is the only restrictor for how much they can carry.
-The carry capacity is thusly concluded to be “so high it doesn’t matter”
-They then stop tracking their encumbrance – even though they might track their inventory.
But, how are people carrying what they carry? Stacked on their head? In their pocket? D&D5e actually have back packs and stuff, which has a limit on how much you can carry on them. Which is a lot lower than your max capacity.
On our games we began to track how we carry things, because:
1. It made things more immersive, because you had a feeling for your character’s physical presence.
2. It made things easier to track, both what you had – and would use – and also the encumbrance.
We also realized “carry capacity” means how much your character can lift, and carry – not how much they can “have on them.”
In a recent game, which is in WWN not D&D, one of the players exclaims that “I can’t carry any of that” when they found 3 encumbrance worth of treasure. If the others couldn’t do it either it would have created an obstacle for them to overcome. If we ignored encumbrance it would never become an obstacle.
Since it was sort of outside of my original comment, but something I thought about:
I also have a rule that I enforce: Unless you declared you are bringing something, and it’s not on your inventory list, you don’t have it. Even if you intended to bring it.
It might be because my group plays online that I don’t have issues with tracking during gameplay. Foundry VTT has a decent drag and drop system for items, and for WWNs character sheet in there at least you have simple buttons where you can click if you have it “readied” or “stowed” or neither. Meaning you can have things on your inventory sheet, that’s just “zero”
I created a slot-based inventory system on the digital whiteboarding program Miro, and my players love it.
A very weak character has 4 slots, while a very strong one has 12. Items are represented by digital cards which each require about one minute to create, including all the relevant info like a weapon’s damage. Once you have a card for “spear” or “bedroll,” you can instantly copy-paste it from then on. (We have a growing library of item cards off to one side, for this exact purpose.)
Regular items, like a short sword, take up one slot; large items, like a great axe, take up two slots. Very large items take up even more (e.g., plate mail is 4 slots, while carrying an unconscious person is 8 slots). Five hundred silver pennies also takes up one slot, so treasure can become an interesting problem.
Each character also has an empty space for small items that don’t take up any slots: a dagger, pen & ink, a few gemstones. If players collect lots of these (e.g., a bandolier of five daggers), it now takes up one slot.
My players have found this system to be intuitive, easy to grok at a glance (“oh look, one of our mercenaries doesn’t have a quiver to go with his bow”), and fun to interact with. I agree with Angry that there’s a lot to be said for a nice, streamlined UI! A couple of them actually enjoy updating the Miro board between sessions, and they all get invested in moving junk between slots before setting out on an adventure or when they find some loot. (The big strong guy always gets some ooohs and aaahs when he shoulders half the party’s camping gear by himself.)
It has been, by far, the best solution to the inventory problem that I’ve found so far. And yes, a big part of it still comes down to me using my parent voice and firmly telling the players that I don’t see a lantern on the inventory board so they’ll be walking in the dark. I still have to enforce encumbrance to make it mean anything. But at least this approach has removed almost all of the friction involved in adhering to the system.
Could this have worked with slick digital UI that tracks pounds and backpacks instead of slots? Yes. But my group has found slots easier to work with, and I have no real reason to die on a hill for tracking item weights rather than slightly abstracted item weights. Consider this a counter-programming recommendation for slot-based inventory! (As long as it’s done with a digital UI.)
I once played in a post apocalyptic setting, and I did a pretty good job of tracking my inventory if I may say so myself, but none of it ever came into play. Despite the setting, there was never a shortage of ammunition, or food, or water for example. So there wasn’t much of a point in me tracking the number of bullets I had, when I could have just written Ammunition: yes. That was a real failure of expectations versus reality as well as communication.
–
I myself have a little hobby system in the works, and in so far I’ve landed on a size category based inventory, you can carry 4 Medium sized items etc, which would fit the bill of slot-based inventory, so I’m interested to hear your thoughts on why you think it bad.
My goal for the system is among other things to reduce any math to a minimum, so it made sense to me to limit the available space to keep book keeping to a more manageable level.
A few downsides I can think of myself is that for one it’s not very realistic and a bit gamey.
Secondly that it’s difficult to quantify space for very small items, for instance a ring would likely take up as many “slots” as a fork or a pouch of coins in the same limited category, which isn’t ideal but it’s not very likely to matter either unless there’s a lot of that category of item being carried. Also similar gripes would likely exist in the traditional system as well, not like the weight of a fork is going to make you encumbered if you weren’t already, but if you’re trying to walk while carrying that fork on your tongue, then we might have a problem.
You’ve engaged in a performative contradiction. You can’t both state that “how inventory is tracked doesn’t matter, you just have to enforce it,” while also going out of your way to build a streamlined inventory solution. The fact that you did the latter rather than purely forcing it is exactly the case for more abstracted inventory.
You’ve engaged in a false equivalency… a streamlined inventory approach isn’t the same as an abstracted inventory approach.
Which is why what I’ve said isn’t contradictory. Yes, the solution is a two-pronged approached of making the process less painful and forcing compliance. But there is a limit to what streamlining the process will get you. As with anything, you can only reduce the pain, you can’t negate it. And notice my streamlining approach didn’t require me to do any abstract slot-based, bulk-based, Resident Evil atache case Tetris horseshit.
The streamlining I did was minimal. I just had a spreadsheet do the final math for the players. What I really did was change when and how often the math was done. Slot-based bullshit isn’t going to score over basic inventory management if you still have to engage with it every time you adjust your inventory. Because the problem isn’t how it’s tracked, it’s when it’s tracked, what impact it has on gameplay, and the actually tracking tool. And do not confuse the tracking tool with what’s being tracked. Slot-based inventory changes what’s being tracked, but it still works exactly the same as list-based inventory on a functional level.
Welp, my original response was deleted because it went over the limit, so I’ll be brief.
1) Regardless of the false equivalency, you did engage in a performative contradiction. You claimed how inventory was tracked didn’t matter. Any streamlining at all betrays that fact. You could just force players to do the painful paperwork process at the end of sessions.
2) Handling the maths is 90% of the work, from the player perspective. Players don’t like to do math, even moreso for the reasons you identified when it comes to inventory (aka figuring out that they can’t do something). Getting players to think through the value of taking 2 of item X instead of 3 of item Y involves 0 arithmetic with slots. Changing one’s whole loadout becomes trivial because it doesn’t require multiple hypothetical sums to be compared.
3) I have an inventory system that gets dyscalculic/dyslexic casual female players to track inventory during play, so I don’t agree that how inventory is tracked doesn’t matter, or that you can’t successfully get players to track painlessly in play. I agree there are bad abstractions: bulk is just bastardized weight, items taking up multiple slots is bastardized bulk, and Tetris is additional complexity with 0 added benefit and infinitely more “feels bad” moments. But there are good abstractions, like usage dice for ammo or even spell slots re: GLOG’s magic dice.
4) Your solution of start of session encumbrance condition + GM fudging for minor things + occasionally breaking out the spreadsheet if a whole loadout is changing during downtime or something, while losing the interesting in-game player decisions about scarcity and encumbrance, is actually dissociatively abstract in its own way.
“Slot-based bullshit isn’t going to score over basic inventory management if you still have to engage with it every time you adjust your inventory. Because the problem isn’t how it’s tracked, it’s when it’s tracked, what impact it has on gameplay, and the actually tracking tool.”
Yes, and by combining approaches (gamifying, abstracting, *and* streamlining), you can get it painless enough to happen in play. Arguing otherwise is a skill/system issue.
I don’t agree and clearly you don’t either. I’m sorry we’re not able to reach a point of understanding.
That said, I cannot leave this uncommented-on because it’s so glaring.
Dyscalculic, dyslexic, casual, and female… what the actual fuck does her sex have to do with anything? Why is that relevant? I’ve never met a woman less capable of tracking inventory purely by virtue of her biology. Is it a hormone thing or do boobs get in the way of writing? I mean, I’m a hefty guy, so I’ve got boobs. Little ones. But still… they’ve never impeded my ability to fill out a character sheet.
What the actual hell?
My groups use Roll20 which does a nice job of the math for weight and is pretty easy to change quantities quickly. And it can be funny when my character says, uh, “keep the change” so they don’t end up encumbered by a pile of coppers pushing them over the limit. (Always leave space in your backpack when going out adventuring, kids!)
Worth a mention, I think, is considering if your players need time at the end of the turn to update their resources. I work hard at planning my action+ to be efficient and not holding anyone up. By the end of the turn I need to remember all the resources I used and usually I am updating this while other things are happening in game and sometimes this is a challenging use of my concentration. If your players are having trouble, consider if they might benefit giving them a pause to get their notes in order/resources updated and normalize that this takes time and is part of taking a turn.
I’m usually very good but sometimes even I get to the end of a session and have to retcon how many arrows I used, etc, if it was an especially tense and exciting session.