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. 

 

1. Slot Allotment

Let’s start by looking at the current weight allowances. Since my hack will drop percentile Strength, I’ll be using the allowances from Dark Sun Revised, as I think they scale better with a straight 1-25 range. They’re not that far off from the base game, anyway.

The goal here is to determine how much an individual ‘slot’ equals in 2e weight. Some simple division immediately shows that I have a problem.

Score	Weight Allowed (lbs.)	Weight per Score (lbs.)
1	1	1.00
2	1	0.50
3	5	1.67
4	10	2.50
5	10	2.00
6	20	3.33
7	20	2.86
8	35	4.38
9	35	3.89
10	40	4.00
11	40	3.64
12	45	3.75
13	45	3.46
14	55	3.93
15	55	3.67
16	70	4.38
17	85	5.00
18	110	6.11
19	135	7.11
20	170	8.50
21	255	12.14
22	360	16.36
23	445	19.35
24	515	21.46
25	635	25.40

 

Between scores of 8 and 15, we’re just shy of an average of 4 lbs. That’s perfect, as I can just divide the weight of any 2e item by 4 to get a fairly close approximation of how much ‘score’ each item takes up. However, outside of those ranges we are in different territory.

 

Score/Slots	Resulting Weight (lbs.)	Off by
1	4	3
2	8	7
3	12	7
4	16	6
5	20	10
6	24	4
7	28	8
8	32	-3
9	36	1
10	40	0
11	44	4
12	48	3
13	52	7
14	56	1
15	60	5
16	64	-6
17	68	-17
18	72	-38
19	76	-59
20	80	-90
21	84	-171
22	88	-272
23	92	-353
24	96	-419
25	100	-535

 

For the low scores, this isn’t so concerning. I don’t think I’ll fundamentally change the game if a 4 Str character can carry 16 pounds instead of 10. The higher ranges, however, will require modifications if we’re going to get anywhere close.

 

1.1. Bonus Slots

I played around with multiplying the score or providing tiered bonuses, but that just adds more math to avoid a table column. Instead, what I ended up with is:

Score	Slots	Resulting Weight (lbs.)	Off by
1	1	4	3
2	2	8	7
3	3	12	7
4	4	16	6
5	5	20	10
6	6	24	4
7	7	28	8
8	8	32	-3
9	9	36	1
10	10	40	0
11	11	44	4
12	12	48	3
13	13	52	7
14	14	56	1
15	15	60	5
16	20	80	10
17	25	100	15
18	30	120	10
19	35	140	5
20	45	180	10
21	65	260	5
22	90	360	0
23	110	440	-5
24	130	520	5
25	160	640	5

 

This gets us where we want to be. I’m losing the elegance of “your carrying capacity equals your Strength score,” but I think it’s worth the loss to keep high Strength scores from being underpowered. Besides, no one except the Fighter is ever going to deal with more than three of these modifications. It doesn’t even need to be a column in the Strength table; I can just note these increased slots in a small side table in the Encumbrance section.

The weight allowance between 16 and 20 does jump a bit from the original values, which could be better aligned by granting fewer slots, but I think it’s worth keeping those numbers divisible by 5. The jumps look cleaner and are distinct from the Strength scores themselves, which matters when glomming an extra system to what was supposed to be a simple one-to-one tool. To achieve that, I think it’s worth handing the PCs a bit more stuff.

 

2. Item Slot Values

Next, I need to figure out how many slots everything costs. We’ve established a weight of 4 pounds per slot, so let’s grab an assortment of 2e equipment and start dividing.

 

Equipment	2e Weight (lbs.)	Divided by 4	Rounded Up to Whole #	Multiplied by 4 (lbs.)	Difference (lbs.)
Weapons
Halberd	15	3.75	4	16	1
Two-handed sword	15	3.75	4	16	1
Heavy crossbow	14	3.5	4	16	2
Morning star	12	3	3	12	0
Footman’s mace	10	2.5	3	12	2
Battle axe	7	1.75	2	8	1
Light crossbow	7	1.75	2	8	1
Broad sword	4	1	1	4	0
Long sword	4	1	1	4	0
Long bow	3	0.75	1	4	1
Short sword	3	0.75	1	4	1
Short bow	2	0.5	1	4	2
Dagger	1	0.25	0	0	-1
Armor
Full plate	70	17.5	18	72	2
Field plate	60	15	15	60	0
Plate mail	50	12.5	13	52	2
Chain mail	40	10	10	40	0
Ring mail	30	7.5	8	32	2
Studded leather	25	6.25	6	24	-1
Leather	15	3.75	4	16	1
Body Shield	15	3.75	4	16	1
Medium Shield	10	2.5	3	12	2
Small Shield	5	1.25	1	4	-1
Buckler	3	0.75	1	4	1
Items
Rope, hemp	20	5	5	20	0
Rope, silk	8	2	2	8	0
Grappling Hook	4	1	1	4	0
Bullseye Lantern	3	0.75	1	4	1
Backpack	2	0.5	1	4	2
Hooded Lantern	2	0.5	1	4	2
Belt pouch, large	1	0.25	0	0	-1
Thieves’ picks	1	0.25	0	0	-1
Lamp oil (flask)	1	0.25	0	0	-1
Bolt case	1	0.25	0	0	-1
Quiver	1	0.25	0	0	-1
Belt pouch, small	0.5	0.25	0	0	-0.5
Sack, large	0.5	0.125	0	0	-0.5
Piton	0.5	0.125	0	0	-0.5

 

Mostly on the mark, here. Weapons are great with everything ranging 1 to 4, while most of the standard fare comes in at 1 slot (except the dagger, see below). Armor is also fine and I see no issue with the scale. Due to rounding to the nearest whole number, most things are pound or two heavier than they would be in 2e, but considering the slot system gives an average extra carrying capacity of 2.25 pounds in the 8-15 Strength range, I’m fine with that.

 

2.1. Light Items

Items need a bit of work. Everything in the sub-4 pound range cuts into two categories: 1 slot or no slots. I’m good with lanterns and anything else at 2 pounds coming in at 1 slot, though I think that the Backpack (and other worn containers) should not weigh anything at all.

The main issue is 1 pound items. I think the simplest solution to this is to give them their own category of weight, which I’ll consider “Light,” and allow you to bundle them to equal a single slot. By the math, this should be 4 items. However, multiples of 5 are easier and look cleaner, and give back a little extra to the PC, so I’ll go that way.

 

2.2. Small Items

There’s also a category of items in 2e that only give their weight in asterisks, meant to signify very small items that are 10 to the pound, stuff like candles, bottles, and whistles. Sticking with the 5 light items per slot theme, I’ll make these “Small” items 50 per slot.

There’s actually another category of asterisked items, made up of paper and paper-adjacent sheets, fishhooks, and sewing needles, which only come into play in the hundreds. It’s a bit silly when you consider that Rope is weighted in 50 foot coils, but these aren’t weighed the same way, i.e. reams of paper and the like. In any case, if the system is going to itemize things like this, they should be bundled up to a Small weight class or considered inconsequential.

 

2.3. Coins and Free Space

The last bit to figure out is coins. They seem like a good candidate to mix with the Small items, but coins are 50 to the pound in 2e, so they’re actually too light for that class. Those 50 coins would be on target as a Light item, but that raises another question: what do you do when the player has 34 silver or whatever? Do you fractionalize Light items? That’s just a bit too messy for me.

I think I’ll have to give coins their own category, and make every 200 coins equal 1 slot. The fractionalization question still raises its head, but in making them separate we can answer this by making the first 200 coins a freebie; you don’t use the slot until you’ve filled it up. If you have 3 or 70 or 199 copper, that’s no weight at all. If you have 200 of them, you’ve used a slot, up to 399.

I think that’s a good call for easy counting, and it can be extended to any of the ‘this many per slot’ categories to avoid fractionalized counting across the board. 4 Light items, 49 Small items, and 199 coins take up no slots, though they would weigh around 13 pounds in 2e. If you’ve got 7 Light items, 54 Small items, and 201 coins? That’s 3 slots, equivalent to 12 pounds, versus 2e’s 16 pounds. However you try to game it, you only ever get about a dozen free pounds of converted weight, and I’m willing to hand that to the players to make counting it all much easier.

 

3. Conclusion

This is shaping up to be what I wanted.

I’ve beefed up the PC’s carrying capacity a little. While every item with a specific slot usage is a bit heavier, this doesn’t come close to evening out the increase. Instead, the item rules push it the other way by offering freebies, including item count thresholds and weightless containers. Not mentioned prior is that 2e assumed that your character’s clothes weighed 5 pounds and should be added to the count toward encumbrance, which I’ll wholly discard. As a result of all the above, and depending on the Strength score and what they choose to carry, characters could potentially hold an extra ~25 pounds compared to their 2e counterparts.

I’ve stated a few times that I’m fine with this, not only because I’m always happy to give a little bit more to the player, but as you’ll see next time when we talk about encumbrance penalties, they’ll need it.