Hacking 2e: Encumbrance and Weight – Part 2

Last time, I reworked the 2e weights and weight allowances into a slot-based system. The final step is to determine encumbrance penalties.

This is the entire reason we’re here. These penalties are the stick used to enforce the agonizing decisions inherent in encumbrance rules. Without them, there’s no reason to track anything at all, and that way lies 5e and players who occasionally look through their inventory to discover oddities from old adventures, like they’re rifling through their parents’ attic.

AD&D used ranges, or weight bands, to determine when penalties applied. Let’s start there.

Hacking 2e: Encumbrance and Weight – Part 1

Encumbrance is considered a pillar of old-school play, creating a natural limiter on what can be brought into – and out of – the dungeon. It creates a puzzle, wherein players agonize over what should be carried and what must be dropped, and opens the game to unique solutions such as hiring people or using beasts of burden. It makes magical items which subvert encumbrance into coveted treasures.

It’s also a huge pain and a taxing mental load. Especially in most editions of D&D, wherein you either need to add up large, abstracted coin weight or small, fractional pounds. This is the kind of ruleset for which people end up making spreadsheets. By the time you’re opening Excel to run a subsystem for a tabletop game, I’d argue you’ve left the Realm of Game and entered the Duchy of Simulator. This caused many tables to abstract encumbrance or ignore it altogether. As a result, the idea of tracking any of the character’s gear faded from modern D&D by 4th Edition. Notably ahead of its time, 2nd Edition made encumbrance optional.

If you want more detail on the history of encumbrance rules in D&D, check out these posts from Simulacrum: Exploring OSR Design and Welcome to the Deathtrap.

The OSR does its OSR thing when it comes to encumbrance: the mechanical approaches include points, slots, and grids, while unique sub-mechanics abound. Of these, I find slot-based encumbrance to be the most simple and adaptable for my modification of 2e, so I’ll follow the crowd here. As I noted in my post on Strength, that was the plan all along: the number of available slots can be the Strength score itself.

Now I have to execute it, which means establishing slot allotment, item slot values, and encumbrance penalties. For this first part, I’ll tackle the first two. 

Hacking 2e: Encounter Reactions

Prior to getting behind the wheel of 2nd Edition, my experience with implementing ‘reactions’ centered around the skill check. Diplomacy (and later Persuasion), was the centerpiece of NPC good will or antipathy. Generally, this almost never took the form of a ‘called check’ by the DM based on player actions, but was instead a player-requested check: “Can I roll Diplomacy to make this guy tell us where the MacGuffin is?” This playstyle is the exact thing that the OSR, in all its various iterations, has been scrambling away from for 20 years.

If you’ve played any modern version of D&D, you’ve seen that moment where the face character botches the Persuasion check and the player dutifully acts out the resulting buffoonery. Plenty of laughs have been had here, though it’s always bothered me that charismatic PC would randomly turn into a social moron every once in a while. Even if not taken to that extreme, the player-facing results leave little room for nuance in the roleplay: the failed check is a failed check, and the party is apt to focus on the die result and its repercussions, rather than the NPC in front of them.

Charisma has become king in social interactions; a party’s ability to win friends and influence people isn’t based on their actions or their reputation, but on the high score of whichever player didn’t dump Charisma. Obviously, Charisma should have a place in social matters, as that’s basically all it’s there for, but it shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all of whether NPCs have a positive or negative reaction to your collection of murder hobos.

2nd Edition has been a breath of fresh air. First, it keeps the reaction of the NPCs and monsters behind the screen; the players need to assess the social situation on its own terms, based on information communicated by the DM. Second, the face character can’t just spam the Charisma button; players need to determine how they’re going to approach any particular group, and hope that their bonuses from Charisma, their reputation, and their choices will carry the day.

That’s all to say, I like Reaction rolls. It’s good stuff. To figure out how it’ll look in a 2e rework, let’s look at the rules.

2e DM Screen

My hunt for a good 2e DM screen has been somewhat unsatisfying. There’s the official screen which does the job, but the layout and arrangement of the tables leaves something to be desired (a criticism I extend to the books, generally). There are some fan creations online, but there’s always something about them that doesn’t quite meet my needs.

My 2e Primer’s Quick Reference has served me for many games, but it contains much information that I don’t immediately need during play, while also missing some tables that I’d like quick access to. Really, what I’d love is a DM screen that has the Primer’s information, but laid out in a condensed format, with related tables arranged near each other.

So I made one.

 

Actually, I made two: One in landscape orientation and another in portrait.

I tried to keep everything to four panels, but good lord this edition is lousy with tables. Instead, it’s five panels, but the final panel is completely monster-based and can be considered an optional loose reference sheet.

It’s been helpful in the handful of sessions in which I’ve used it, but I can’t call it battle-tested. If you find it of use in your games, or if you see errors to be corrected or additions to be made, please let me know!

2e DM Screen – Landscape

2e DM Screen – Portrait

Note: I’ve also updated the 2e Primer with additional corrections and amendments. Nothing major, just thought you should know I constantly update it to reflect any new information I find that helps illuminate the darker recesses of this edition.

[I've made some edits to the document based on feedback. Morale and surprise modifiers have been cleaned up. The Common Equipment table has been axed in favor of Turn Undead. I'll keep a version number on the document from here on, and will update based on feedback. Thanks Lord Torath and Downingman.]

Hacking 2e: Initiative and Modifiers

AD&D 2nd Edition’s default initiative rule is the tried and true side-initiative (which it calls Standard Initiative Procedure), meaning that one roll is made for each ‘side’ in a combat. Modifiers are applied only for circumstances where an effect applies to everyone on a side. This rule is easy, fast, and shared between all versions of Basic and AD&D. 2e adds two optional initiative mechanics: Individual Initiative, where each PC and monster gets its own initiative rolls and applies modifiers per participant, and Group Initiative, where side-initiative is used but modifiers are still applied per participant.

Weapon Speed is offered as an optional rule, though it’s used as a given in all the examples of Individual and Group initiative. Spellcasting speed is portrayed as apparently not optional, even though most of it wouldn’t function with the Standard method. Multiple Attacks get special rules that put the extra attacks after all the other attacks, while spells requiring a round or more to cast get shoved to the end of the round(s).

All in all, it’s a serviceable initiative system that sometimes doesn’t know which version it prefers that you use. However, if you want to use all the special modifiers available, it clunks a bit when you have to do this every round.