Why you should definitely use “encumbrance” rules in your D&D 5e game or any TTRPG.
I have heard plenty of complaints from players about encumbrance in TTRPGs.
“Why does it matter?”
“What’s the big deal, who cares how much something weighs?”
Maybe this has its origins in the video game culture where an avatar can run around the battlefield carrying literally dozens of weapons, swapping them out at the push of a button and reloading with a swish and click of the controls. Or maybe it’s just a matter of convenience and an aversion to “book-keeping” that many players feel robs them of their agency and takes away from “the moment” or “the vibe” of the game and the way they want to enjoy it. I think that these players are missing out on a whole aspect of TTRPGs that has been overlooked for almost two decades now namely the benefits of “realism” in an imaginary scenario.
Hear me out: I know it’s counter-intuitive to inject realism into a game that is fundamentally meant to provide an escape from the realities and drudgery of day-to-day existence. One might think that doing so defeats the purpose of a fantasy game where pretend people move about in a pretend world and interact with pretend objects and other pretend people. This is not the case.
Just as when watching a movie you can sometimes catch yourself rolling your eyes at some action or scenario on the screen and mouthing the words, “That would never happen,” or “That’s not what someone would really do there,” some element of “the real” must be infused into any game or movie or novel or indeed any other form of story. Absence of “the real” can cause an entire universe to crumble and fall as suspension of disbelief achieves critical mass and the participant is violently snatched out of the imaginary world and back into their living room or theater seat being forever robbed of the ability to once again enter the imaginary world in the face of its blatant disregard for, ironically enough, reality.
So as much as we might not like to admit it: reality is key to any fictional story and a TTRPG is simply a fictional story unfolding moment to moment in the shared conscious minds of the players participating. One of the best ways to firmly invest the players in the world is to anchor them to it with simple and familiar “sign-posts” of reality that they can all relate to.
Which brings us to encumbrance. If the players wanted to run around as avatars in a video game switching from laser rifle to sticky grenade or energy sword to plasma-bazooka then they would be playing a video game. But they aren’t; they have chosen to play a different kind of game. A game where the limitations of a video game stand in stark contrast to the infinite possibilities of a game in a megaverse that literally has no boundaries.
Back to “sign-posts.” These are things that call back to the real world and reality that everyone around the table can, to varying degrees, relate to. To be fair not everyone will see or envision encumbrance the same way. A person who spends his day working in a cubicle will have a different real-world experience of encumbrance than say a veteran who has carried fifty or more pounds of heavy gear for hours over many miles.
This is fine and not an insurmountable obstacle because both the guy working in the cubicle and the veteran know what it is like to stand before an open trunk filled with a dozen plastic-handled grocery bags looking forlornly at four flights of switchback staircases leading up to their third-floor apartment. In that moment both players can find an immense amount of common ground and agreement on what encumbrance is and how it is anything but trivial.
This is precisely why things like encumbrance are so important. It is a sign-post or anchor in the game that can pull the character back into the fantasy setting when all manner of things are acting around him to try and yank him out of it. Every TTRPG player knows the headache of trying to concentrate on a battle between player characters and some monster while people in the room or on screen are wrangling their kids or slurping noodles on screen, or constantly texting on their phone, or crunching Doritos in a cloud of orange dust accompanied by the sound of a wheelless cart being dragged slowly across a field of gravel.
As counter-intuitive as it seems that you might need something from the “real world” to pull you back into a fictional world that you initially entered for the express purpose of escaping the real one – this is precisely what players need. They need the mundane drudgery of gravity and exhaustion sometimes. Sometimes they need the well-known misery of having to walk across a vast parking lot in pouring rain with every thigh-chafing and sock-soaking step along the way to remind them that their character is out there somewhere alive and struggling, just like everybody else, to make it through another day.
It speaks to what can elevate a TTRPG from “just a game” to its highest potential of an actual adventure where all of a sudden it matters to you how strong you are or who gets the Bag of Holding found in the Troll Lair.
We play TTRPGs because we don’t want to clunkily hop a molded piece of pewter from square to square around a Monopoly board.
No.
We want to, with our legs burning from the steep climb, crest the ridge in the pouring rain with a full moon behind us, wiping the mud and water from our eyes to behold through sheets of rain a vast hidden valley below suddenly lit from mountain-wall to mountain-wall by a bolt of lightning accompanied by a peal of thunder.
We only get there after the grueling mountain climb, though.
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