Mausritter and a Resource Management Link Retrospective

Last year, I wrote the first post of what I hoped would be a series, where I kept up with what other roleplaying bloggers are writing about resource management in their games. That initial post didn't have a planned theme, although most of the posts I looked at were talking about encumbrance, and thinking about how to assign encumbrance slots.

At the time, I made a few recommendations. I suggested that encumbrance rules should be kept as simple as possible because different kinds of complexity add up very quickly. I suggested that encumbrance should be fairly consistent from character to character - although tying carrying capacity to Strength is popular, I think that allowing it to vary from 3 to 18 is too much. I noted that using the Strength bonus instead of the Strength score is one compromise solution; another would just be to make carrying capacity the same for everybody.

I praised Goblin Punch's "triple X depletion" rule. The idea here is that if you're using a supply that gets used up over time, you track the rate of it getting used up by marking three Xs next to the item name, and the third X means you've run out. If you combine that with a rule that says small items come in bundles of 3, suddenly you've got a fairly simple, fairly consistent rule for tracking supplies.

At the time, I came down against "backpack" rules that let you trade 1 or 2 encumbrance slots for a "backpack" that has extra slots inside. My reasoning was that this trade doesn't really feel like a trade-off to me. If there's no downside and only benefit to carrying a backpack, why not assume that every character has one, and just increase the base carrying capacity by whatever amount the backpack was going to add?

I've thought about this a little since then, and I think there is a purpose that "pack" rules can serve. If you want to have a second type of encumbrance with a second and smaller carrying capacity, then envisioning this as a "pack" seems like as good a mental image as any (although maybe it would be better to think of the primary encumbrance as a "backpack" and the secondary encumbrance as a "side-bag"?) I've mentioned this idea before - Stars Without Number has special encumbrance slots for items you can access instantly in combat, Numenera has special slots for magic items, Shadows of Brimstone has special slots for single-use items, etc.

I wouldn't recommend that you try to use more than one of these systems at a time, but clearly, some rules systems see a benefit to having a second, more restrictive carrying capacity for a special class of important items. I have a few suggestions. First, if "side-bag" capacity can potentially increase, I say let it grow based on character level, rather making a better bag something you can just find or buy. A more experienced character becomes a better packer! Second, don't insist that characters "give up" any of their primary encumbrance slots in order to carry a "side-bag". Just assume that everyone has one, and set your numbers accordingly.

If you really want to create a trade-off, then say that wearing heavy armor means you can't carry a side-bag (and wearing extra-heavy armor means you can't carry a backpack or side-bag!) But otherwise, accept that you've created a system where everyone has two types of encumbrance, and don't add complication by pretending that the players have a meaningful choice to trade a couple of one type of slot for a handful of the other. The only reason to allow such a trade would be if certain character classes (like alchemists, maybe?) had a unique and special option to give up a regular slot or two in exchange for their class-specific ability to carry special materials. (Or, you know, just let them have their special class-defining feature without punishing them for it, whichever.)

 

  

 

On Discord, KingPenta of the Dice Blade blog asked me if I would consider looking back on my last post about this and reflecting on what I think works. My long answer to that question is above.

My short answer is just three words: Mausritter is lit.

  

Mausritter

 

Okay, so maybe there's also a long version of my short answer, but it's basically just me singing Mausritter's praises. If you were to take every good idea people in the OSR scene had about encumbrance, edited those down to their simplest and purest versions, and combined them into a single ruleset, you would have the resource management rules from Mausritter.

I think I've said before that I consider Into the Odd to be something like the Platonic ideal of simple Dungeons & Dragons. Both the rules and the writing have been distilled down to their very essence and presented in the tersest, most compact possible way, without sacrificing the elements that are most essential to play. I'm not saying that no one else can write something better than I2TO, but I am saying that you'd be hard pressed to write something shorter. Chris McDowell has seemingly cut out everything but the most necessary elements of D&D, and edited his own writing to be as terse as possible. Trying to compete on either of those fronts is likely to leave you with something that either no longer really feels like D&D or is no longer really legible.

Well, in the same way, Mausritter, which is built off the bones of I2TO, feels like the Platonic idea of simple resource management for D&D. You might be able to write something better, but you probably can't write something simpler or shorter without making sacrifices that change the feel of the game so much that it becomes something else.

 

And part of how Isaac Williams does it is by taking advantage of an underutilized solution for resource management - illustrated inventories.

 

Paper Elemental giving some very good advice here

Mausritter putting theory into action

Almost the entirety of Mausritter's inventory rules fit on that two-page spread. ("Inventory" is also a MUCH better word than "encumbrance", which always feels like it should be accompanied by sad trombones.) You have exactly 10 slots of carrying capacity. Armor and heavy weapons take up two slots apiece, most other items take up only one. Every item has little boxes to mark off their "usage" - torches after an hour of burning, rations after eating, weapons and armor after combat, other items after they get used in a serious way. Most items have 3 boxes, fancy electric lanterns - and by implication, any other really expensive, high-quality goods - have 6. Spells are represented as sigils or runes that you carry. Conditions such as injury and exhaustion take up an inventory slot until you take care of them.

And ... that's pretty much it. Like I said, it's like every good idea for inventory management, everything Torchbearer tries to do in its own more-complex way, edited down to just about the simplest imaginable version of itself. The art both helps you recognize the item and communicates volumes about the setting. Because you can print off and cut out your own little inventory tokens, you can quite literally organize your inventory by moving them around, and you can write-on and erase the individual tokens until they need to be replaced, without wrecking your main character sheet.

The larger size of certain items creates simple but interesting packing dilemmas - for example, light armor needs a shield, which means you can't wield large weapons at the same time. The different situations for checking usage give each item a slightly different feel, and some add an element of unpredictable risk. Improvised weapons get used up a little each combat, but for the others, there's only a 50% chance it'll be depleted. The same is true of the spell runes. Pick how many charges you're willing to risk using up and roll that many GLOG-style Magic Dice; each charge has a 50% chance of being expended by casting the spell. Although the chances are the same, to me this feels like for weapons, you're checking to see if they are surprisingly damaged, while for spells, you're finding out if they're miraculously not used up (perhaps simply by comparison to other rule systems, where weapons are always fine, and spells are always expended in casting).

 

 

 

Having slightly gotten back into the swing of this, and realized I'll enjoy it more if I organize these posts thematically rather than chronologically, you can probably expect to see more posts like this in the future, hopefully at a faster rate than once per year.

I should also note, in looking at the Mausritter website to write this, I realized that it's getting a fancy boxed-set edition from Games Omnivorous next month. The same charming art as ever, now printed on very heavy paper.