This is the transcript for this video titled “Counting arrows, calibrating systems, and weighing armour: When NOT to ignore this stupid stuff”.

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At first blush, it may seem like Encumbrance and Gear Maintenance are separate, unrelated rules but I’ve learned that like salt and caramel, they are better together. I’ll explain why.

First – some definitions:

Encumbrance is carrying capacity – basically, how big is your backpack how much can it carry before it splits. In most games, what it takes for a player to feel encumbered is a factor of their strength score, so like If you carry weight in excess of 5 times your Strength score, you are ‘encumbered‘, which means your speed drops by 10 feet.

Gear maintenance is making sure that the things you have on you are kept in working condition. Just like everything in real life is subject to wear and tear, it’s the same for things the characters have and use. Your kitchen knives dull over time; for sure if you’re hacking against armour every few weeks even, your sword is going to need a fix. Or the seams holding your Kevlar vest together seem to be coming loose after pulling it on and taking it off every single day. 

So both these rules get totally ignored, or hand-waved away by throwing a bag of holding at your players in the early days of your game, and that is the right call for most games. Honestly, when your players are stopping an illegal space mining operation where the corpo is using orphans as canaries or they have to stop an archlich trying to ascend to godhood, who cares about the seams in your armoured vest, or the sharpness of your sword or whether your speed is slowed ten feet because you’re carrying one weapon too many… that stuff gets in the way of the story being told and the game you are trying to play. It gives additional, ultimately irrelevant things, for the players and GM to have to consider in navigating the game.

However – let me tell you about when I’ve learned these rules make a big difference. If you are running a game where survival and scarcity are key themes, then part of the mechanics of the game should include encumbrance rules and gear maintenance. Here’s where I think they work together – In a world where there is not much of anything, it will be difficult to get stuff, and once you get it, difficult to maintain. Also, if everything is difficult to get, that means food is too, so you’re probably not really all that strong. So what it takes for you to feel encumbered is lower than in a world where you get nutrition whenever. So you’re being really choosy about what to carry. To really drive that point of scarcity home, maintenance of those things you choose to carry should be a regular part of downtime between missions or quests because if you don’t maintain it, it has a chance to fuck up when you are using it. Making sure you consume and keep track of rations should be part of downtime in a scarcity-survival world as well, but we’ll cover rations separately. The other big thing to remember is that this is super not for everyone. Some people find joy in having these obstacles to overcome and the hard choices that go into deciding your next step. Other people really don’t. So – just keep that in mind too.

There are two places where I’ve seen some great mechanics around this. The first one is Last of Us and Last of Us 2 from Naughty Dog and I’m not just saying that because I want to be, be best friends with, and be with Ashley Johnson. Last of Us takes place in post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested America. Survival is the name of the game. There, you have a limit to your carrying capacity – can pick up materials to make things like healing kits, and you can pick up improvised weapons and hold one at a time like a baseball bat with nails at the top. You can pick up guns and ammo – and they are lethal for sure and help with survival but they also cause a lot of noise and in a world where not being seen by hostiles is a pretty key part of surviving, a gunshot is not a great idea. On the other hand, improvised handheld weapons are similarly lethal and silent, but don’t have the range and they wear out after three or four uses. So you have to be real active about what you pick up and real choosy what you use. And interestingly enough, when you make the game harder, the scarcity of supplies increases. So it’s not just more and tougher zombies – it’s less stuff to deal with them.

The other place is the tabletop game, Red Markets. The tagline is “a game of economic horror” – it’s done by the same guy that did Eclipse Phase. So if you are familiar with Eclipse Phase and how crunchy the mechanics of that game are, this is similar levels of crunch. I personally like that for short bursts, and Red Markets is probably one of the best settings i’ve read – it’s so much more than your standard zombie post apocalypse. We’re not talking about the broader mechanics here though – I want to talk specifically about how this game handles scarcity and survival. I’m going to broad strokes this but basically, there are pools of available use, for both the tool you are using for wear and tear, and for yourself as energy expenditure – doing maintenance in downtime makes sure those pools are full. So when you do anything that requires exertion, you are marking off a pool of energy use AND tool use. So let’s say you started with 5 energy, and 3 tool – now, after this one action, you have 4 in energy and 2 in tool. This game is brutal. But I have never seen a better mechanic to incentivize a more cautious style of play. You are so careful about what you carry, what you use, and even if you do anything other than sneaking around. I’ve posted a small section of the quickstart on Gear. The quickstart is available for pay-what-you-want on drivethrurpg by the way…

But again here, I need to reiterate – figuring out how to play through scarcity and in themes of survival are not for everyone.

But if you and your players decide that this is a fun story theme and type of game narrative to explore together, figure out how to include encumbrance and gear maintenance mechanics because it’ll make the desperation or the situation really come through.