Loot And Encumbrance

In the process of writing an RPG that at its core wants to support dungeon-looting play more than is usual, the idea of encumbrance plays an important part. In older editions of D&D, the particulars of how you are going to get loads of loot out of a dungeon are important. Encumbrance systems are there to essentially limit the amount of crap you can make off with in one go. As a party, if you were expecting to collect a lot of junk then you needed to prepare for the eventuality by hiring minions or buying pack animals, or you had to settle for not being able to make off with a thousand pounds of gold.

A lot of modern gamers, myself included, don’t really have the patience to deal with this completely. I like the idea of encumbrance – it forces a meaningful decision. If you are in a large enough dungeon, then at a certain point you either stop collecting loot, or you toss some and grab stuff preferentially for its value or utility, or you have to leave with the stuff you have, and return later for the rest of the stuff. Each of these decisions can provide a wealth of roleplaying and challenge opportunities depending on the locale.

However, encumbrance values are typically tied to weight, which is tied to the strength of the person or animal shouldering the burden. Keeping track of the weight of each object and the carrying capacity of each character through each room of a dungeon, as more stuff is accumulated, can be time consuming and is in itself not really what I like about the idea of encumbrance. The capacities of each party member vary greatly, and they may take differing penalties from being heavily encumbered. I, personally, can tolerate this to an extent, but I also know how much it turns people off. D&D 4e for example made Encumbrance pretty hard to get slapped with, by making carrying capacities pretty generous even if you dumped Strength. To me as long as you’re still referring to it as penny-pinching with pounds and points of Strength, people will gloss it over.

This led me to try to come up with an abstraction of the concept that can be heavily generalized and easily put to use by the GM and the players, and quickly referenced and tracked, using smaller numbers and tied to meaningful adventure progress.

Loot Points is the idea that you can measure loot according to your progress through a dungeon. Each adventuring group has a maximum capacity for Loot Points (Looting Capacity) at a party level – that means the whole of the party has 1 capacity number. Each room in a dungeon that they venture into is rated with Loot Points, which are a sign of how much junk is in the room that you could conceivably take. Each individual Loot Point or Points is either a thing or a collection of things (in the case of a mound of coins, or a giant bush of super rare golden berries, or some other set of like things) that have a value – like a treasure parcel in D&D 4e, for example. Each room would have a profile like:

TORTURE CHAMBER [4 LP]

•Iron Maiden (4 LP, 150 gold)

Which tells you that the only valuable thing in this room is the iron maiden, how much of your party’s capacity it’s going to take up (4 of your loot points) and what the cost is. It generally doesn’t matter who is carrying what – penalties only accrue when your party as a whole is carrying too much junk (more LP than they have capacity) and they are spread evenly around the whole party. You can explain this however you want to, as it’s just convenient. We’ll say for now that an average party has 10 LP. The importance here is that we view LP as being tied to your progression in a dungeon. As you loot rooms, your capacity to loot future rooms decreases, and at some point, you’ll have to go put this stuff somewhere safe, or hawk it off to pay the minions for the day, or something. If you continue collecting things, it will slow you down and render you less efficient and effective (it will give you penalties to rolls in increasing proportion).

Each member of the party contributes to the party’s total LP capacity roughly evenly. We’ll say that the party has 5 people and each is contributing 2 LP. This ONLY matters if the party ever splits up or is missing a person. Some other mechanics might come into play, as the system is currently in flux. For example, henchmen might contribute +1 LP a head, a Mule might contribute a +4 LP bonus, and a brawny Fighter can carry 3 LP instead of 2 LP like everyone else. LP is a measure of how burdensome the particular bundle of loot is. For example, you could also have a mound of coins the next room more valuable than the Iron Maiden and also easier to carry. This adds some more decision points. Do you really want to loot EVERYTHING in the dungeon, or only the things with the best LP/value balance?

Of course, there also has to be consequences for your actions. Whenever you are forced to “turn around” for example, it might trigger a Complication like a combat encounter. And whenever you return to the dungeon again, you might find treasure you left behind is now gone, or damaged and therefore less valuable, and so on. And if you go on over your loot capacity, you suffer penalties to rolls for being over-encumbered. Hiring henchmen and pack mules adds targets to combats – if the mule’s killed and you’re over capacity, you’ll have to ditch stuff! All this sort of thing seems pretty interesting to me, and I hope to be able to make it easy and quick for a GM to make a dungeon, add loot to every room, and for the party and GM to be able to track loot, its value and when it’s time to go back home.

This is customizable depending on what sort of game the GM wants to encourage, by tweaking what you incorporate in the loot set. If you want to encourage some strategic thinking as to what to grab, then take into account weight and make heavy things worth a lot of LP, and divide them from just any other junk – highlight only the things worth taking. If you want to encourage players to steal every single thing that isn’t bolted down, you could have the Iron Maiden above be part of a “Torture Equipment” loot set, which includes tables, thumbscrews, chains, anything the PCs want to take in the room, at 3 or 4 LP for a higher monetary value than just the Iron Maiden alone.

You can even rate the total Loot Points of a dungeon, to give players a vague metagamey sense of how worth it is to go to one location over the other. Or not, as you wish.

Hopefully this simplification can get people to view the cool, entertaining aspects of playing a looty crawl game and the effects and consequences of loot, without having to track kilograms and carrying capacities beyond simple one and two digit numbers. We’ll see once Copper Coins is done and can be properly tested.