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.