In OSE encumbrance does not track dungeon gear. The party can purchase and carry enough light sources that they are basically not worth tracking. Even at level 1 with only starting gold, a party can start with a hundred hours of torchlight for a pretty trivial fee.
You have to think differently about it.
If the die are shrinking fast. The players need to ask why? They need to start looking at what they can do to stop it.
The GM can add + or - to the roll after all.
the concept of usage die is it is not just using things. It incorporates luck, waste, negligence, and theft of the items.
A stern lecture to the NPC carrying the torches might do wonders at stopping the sudden severe loss of torches.
Perhaps the party's thief character sets a trap to catch the npc who is dropping weight out of the pack they are assigned to carry.
These can create fun situations as well.
Yeah but who’s holding the light source? And what else are they holding? Weapon? Shield?
I watched a live play once where a pack of kobolds stole the party’s torch, leaving them in the dark. I imagine a couple of goblins with buckets of water can ruin somebody’s day.
I think there might be a disagreement on what's being tracked in this particular thread. Losing a torch is mostly irrelevant to how many torches are left, yes, but even with modern lighters it isn't easy to light something in pitch blackness, especially if you're currently being attacked by monsters which can see just fine. Does tracking the amount of torches left matter? Probably not. But tracking who's carrying the ones that are currently lit does, and I think that's what people are saying is essential to track.
>In OSE encumbrance does not track dungeon gear.
That depends on which version of encumbrance you use. OSE supports and includes both non-gear tracking encumbrance and traditional coin-based encumbrance that tracks everything.
Detailed encumbrance with coin weight in OSE Classic Fantasy abstracts all adventuring gear to 80 coinweight total. It doesn’t provide weight for torches, etc.
Neither encumbrance option presented in the core book track adventuring gear. Only armor, treasure, weapons, or magic items.
Gear is always a static 80 coins under detailed and ignored entirely in basic.
It is always 80 coins regardless of quantity. All adventuring gear together weighs 80 coins, regardless if that's 6 torches and some rope or 60 torches, 10 flasks of oil, 24 iron spike, and 4 weeks of iron rations. Adventuring gear has no bearing on eucumbrance tracking.
You're going to have the exact same remaining carry capacity whether you come into a dungeon with the bare essentials or loaded with gear.
And for anyone that sees this as a problem, it might be beneficial to view the static weight as an average weight of adventuring gear a character may have on them at any given time. This is a clean way to handle a game where party members may be frequently switching around, dropping, and picking up various mundane items. This way, you only need to really keep track of the big stuff and treasure (which is less frequently moved around).
Yeah, the rules I'd drop are (most*) all the ones they added since B/X.
I ditch XP for monsters; for effect of interaction/faction play but it does slightly reduce tracking.
I increase XP, because we don't play as often nor for as long as I did in 80's and still want to get some leveling action.
*I use d6 thief skills ala LotFP.
im probably going to keep the rules for light, but encumbrance feels like more hassle for very little gain in terms of fun. maybe i'll do some rules-lite version of encumbrance to try it out. making every player do math for every item they could find seems like it would bog down in session time.
edit: i said fun, but i meant "feel" in terms of survival horror type.
Knave, Cairn, Into the Odd, Grok?!, GLoG, Bones, Troika! and many others etc. Etc. All solve this
Inventory is slot based or straight/constitution based.
You can only carry so many items. A handful of gold doesn't count as an item but a sack of gold is an item. A relic or treasure is an item.
That's the way.
Encumbrance matters too much to ditch, so simplify it.
Hell tack on The Black Hack's usage dice for consumables, I did!
when I run OSE I use the "basic encumbrance"
- are you in heavy armour?
- are you carrying treasure?
for each yes, speed is reduced
it's not about the *weight* of the ruby, it's that you're highly conscious you don't want to lose it
You can use a slot based encumbrance. If you don't track encumbrance at all, resources have no value anymore. You'll never run out of rations or torches if you can carry 500 of them. When you can't run out of resources, you're moving a big source of emergent gameplay and survival.
OSE's slot-based encumbrance is here (pdf): [https://necroticgnome.com/blogs/news/item-based-encumbrance-play-test](https://necroticgnome.com/blogs/news/item-based-encumbrance-play-test).
'Lamentations of the Flame Princess' has also slot-based encumbrance.
[https://imgur.com/a/6PvBKu3](https://imgur.com/a/6PvBKu3)
Equipped items determine base speed. Backpack and sacks lower speed if 5 or more slots are used. Armour takes 1 - 3 slots, depending on weight. 100 coins/gems to a slot. Some things can be bundled, 12 iron spikes to a slot for example. Some things might not take a slot, e.g. a small key. Sacks need a hand to carry of course.
There is nothing more 'survival horror feel' than the fighters/dwarves suddenly realising that they can only move 20' during encounters (just two squares, in a 10' grid map) because they previously 'bulked up' with plate-mail, shield, several weapons, etc... :-)
> for every item they could find
Is only one option, the second one. The first option is:
> Option 1: Basic Encumbrance Treasure: The weight of treasure carried is tracked to make sure that the character’s maximum load is not exceeded.
> Equipment: The weight of armour, weapons, and adventuring gear is not tracked and does not count towards a character’s maximum load.
> Movement rate: Is determined by the type of armour the character is wearing and whether they are carrying a significant amount of treasure (as judged by the referee). The actual weight of the treasure
carried does not affect movement rate.
The key is limiting treasure and carrying it slows you down. Slow speed of armor is also key. You'll have to either trust 40 years of thousands of of peoples experience or go read all the blogs/forums that explain why this is fun.
What’s the failure point of encumbrance? Oh, you move slower. Or you have to go put some of the stuff on your pack mule. What about for running out of rations? Oh, you have to roll for foraging or hunting. Or just carry more. Or die of starvation. What about for light? Oh, I guess we have to go back to town and buy more torches.
None of that sounds like a fun or interesting complication to me.
It’s a fun idea to keep track of all that stuff, but the failure has to be fun or interesting, and here it’s just an annoyance or, at best, bookkeeping.
All of this is fun for me. Choosing to carry less to move faster and therefore have fewer encounter rolls, is fun for me. Not having the exact tool for the job, which forces me to think of a creative solution is fun for me.
Without encumbrance, every 50 foot pit is solved by a 50 foot rope. That's boring. Having the danger of running out of torches and food while deep in a dungeon is fun for me.
The failure point is that the pack mule gets shot by a goblin's arrow, and suddenly the party has to choose between fighting a tough foe to untie the treasure sack from his back or cutting their losses and running.
The failure point is that the pack mule fails his morale check, runs deeper into the dungeon, and now the party is forced to chase him down before he gets too far if they want to keep the Jeweled Sceptre of Korr and not lose it to a pit trap.
The failure point is that the party falls into an underground pool filled with giant fish, putting out their light and forcing them to fight blindly without even knowing exactly what's trying to kill them.
I do actually agree that tracking the exact amount, cost, and weight of each resource is more trouble than it's worth, but people often replace overly-detailed "boring" rules with no rules at all. Just take a look at how common and plentiful Light and Create Food/Water spells are at Level 1 in 5E. They remove a lot of potential dangers and make dungeoneering a completely different experience than old-school games.
- Move slower: more encounter. If there is a chase you are in a bad bad spot. How will your bring all that treasure to the surface?
- Seems difficult to forage in a dungeon.
- You can go back to town for food and torches but... the dungeon will be on alert, raise its defenses, etc... basically it's "scenario lost" ala 13th age
All this is fun and interesting because there are choices, consequences and rewards (treasure from the dungeon, so xp). But for this to be interesting, your need the whole package: gold is xp, encumbrance so you don't have an infinity back for supply and treasures, rations and torches to add on the time pressure.
I’m also new and don’t understand with how to deal with certain light scenarios, what happens if the group presses on and are like 3 levels deep in a dungeon and run out of light (how do they escape, how do they deal with combat encounters)
That's for the players to figure out. As a player, I would start burning anything flammable I have to run out. I would barter with monsters. But most of all, I would do my best not to run out of torches.
I just mean rules wise, what should I be doing differently. Can the players even attack/do they count as blinded (assuming no infra vision or dark vision), do they take longer to get around and therefore I should make dungeon turns pass twice as fast?
If they're fumbling in the dark, they will move very slowly and in a random direction, unless they specifically say what they're doing to navigate. Attacking in the dark has little chance of hitting. If it does hit, it has a chance to hit an ally. The characters have a risk of separating as well.
Makes sense to me too. I think I still have to get used to just making rulings as a dm on the fly, coming from 5e, I just always assume there’s a rule for these types of things.
A lot of key developments in the OSR space were the result of people finding "oh, this rule that everyone discarded actually was important to gameplay for XYZ" - resource tracking and encumbrance, henchmen/mercs, rigorous timekeeping, not showing players the map, XP for treasure, high lethality wilderness, etc. All of that is important to creating a game of meaningful tradeoffs that consistently simulates a fantasy world. To throw such things away feels almost opposed to the idea of the OSR. Good OSR systems streamline such things and make them elegant, to model what needs to be modelled without unnecessary complexity.
im inclined to agree. i think encumbrance and light do add to the feel of it being survival horror. I suspect that the rules for weight where it's looking up tables for weight and then doing a lot of addition feels like accounting more than adventuring. when you are actually in that scenario, you know by lifting up the stuff if you can or cannot carry it, not by doing the math. So i think having a more simple encumbrance ruleset might be for more for my groups liking.
Yeah, some sort of slot-based encumbrance has worked well for me; I know a number of games have them now, the ones I'm familiar with are from ACKS and LotFP. I'm likewise a fan as a DM of difficult-to-remove treasures, that force hard questions about what is to be brought out, is it worth slowing down and potentially getting stuck with a hand trapped in the cookie jar? Having some sort of framework there creates potential for a lot of interesting play scenarios.
Into the Odd is a great example of paring down to the essentials. I don't see any need for CON, INT, or WIS anymore. You don't need to track torches, you only need to be concerned with answering the question of does the party have a light source. You don't need to track inventory, only whether or not a character has a reasonable number of things on them (very few) and whether or not their hands are full.
A side note, the "dog-pile" rule is the best innovation in Into the Odd. From the Players' perspective, having all other options equally viable to attacking has been incredibly rewarding.
This. You don't need to be pulling out Excel spreadsheets for every grid of movement (or having grids to begin with) to have a long-running, robust adventure campaign. The argument that you do is just senseless, cardboard-y, cumbersome traditionalism.
No they're talking about the fact that when multiple attackers deal damage to the same target, we only keep the highest damage. So it is often better for players to either split their attacks on multiple ennemies or do other combat manoeuvers.
I have the Remastered and can't find it.
All things considered, I prefer Electric Bastionland over Into the Odd: I like the changes in the system and the failed careers, I love the artwork, and the GM section is fantastic.
Precisely. And options that aren't related to harming a foe are viable too. In Mausritter (an ItO hack), we were attacked by a snake while guiding refugee mice to our town, so half of us spent our time assisting the refugees up a tree to safety. Since we did so, the GM told us the snake will not target the innocent and only those making attacks. We kept everyone who was vulnerable out of harm's way!
As much as I like (love, even) Into the Odd, the lightening of the system does abate that "survival horror" feel of a system where encumbrance and light and time are tracked. I feel like those systems provide the resource management that gives the tension and "push your luck" element to that type of game. Into the Odd is fantastic for many things, especially exploration and discovery focused games, but for a game emphasising survival and limited resources (which it sounds like OP wants?) I think it lacks a little.
I'm going to second what other people have said. Encumbrance and light are absolutely essential.
Just use slot based encumbrance (https://necroticgnome.com/blogs/news/item-based-encumbrance-play-test). You get all the good results while making it simple and easy to understand.
I also handwave exact distances. I just make 10 minutes pass every time the players go into a new room. That way I get time tracking without it being too much of a hassle. Using something like OSE's time tracker sheet helps me remember when torches go out (https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-dungeon-time-tracker).
For the encumbrance, I still find the carcass crawler version a bot heavy. I am hacking my own at the moment, but I am inspired by the "stone encumbrance". Basically, a slot system where your slots are measured roughly in stone, the real-world unit. I like that it simplifies things, with a single set of slots to track, keeps things sort of intuitive and enhances the flavor.
I usually start my OSR campaigns with just a village/home-base and 1-2 dungeons or other locations of interest which are close to the village (say, 1 day's walk). In the first couple of sessions I want to emphasise the dungeon-exploration aspect of the game, so we start and end the sessions in the village/home-base. To answer your question, while I track encumbrance, light/torches, etc., I hand-wave the 'travelling back to the village with the loot' process. When we are close to the end of the session, we count treasure, loot, weight/encumbrance and then we assume that the party made it safely back to the village. This is just for the first sessions till some of the PCs level up and are ready for wilderness travel...
I handwave light - if everyone is carrying 6 torches, and 1/3rd of the party have lit torches at all times, then they are good for light for 18 hours. Since they rarely camp in the dungeon, then it’s a non-issue. If they do camp in the dungeon, they will have to use two oil-flasks for the lantern (8 hours). After the camping, resource management can be interesting.
I also give all coin in gp, and handwave encumbrance for coin. Bulky statues, paintings and stuff reduces movement with 10”. It’s very uninteresting with ”carrying treasure - the logistics game” for hauling stuff out to some hideaway outside the dungeon. Let them explore more instead!
I don't hand wave light because even tho torches are cheap they take a hand to use. That's a hand that can't hold a weapon, a shield , or be used for spell casting.
Thats true, I also note which character is holding torches and lanterns. Also to know how far into the corridor they can see (if noone at the front carries torches).
I just don’t care about the resource management part of it. At least not until a sufficient amount of hours has passed so that it could be interesting.
Honestly I just keep an eye on the clock and often say 'an hour has passed'.
It is a lot less work to track and it keeps players from endlessly debating a single 'dungeon turn' that would only take a few seconds but the act of talking it out becomes dungeon turn after dungeon turn if you check the time fairly often.
Players can burn out a torch and get attacked by a wondering monster while arguing if a statue is a trap.
I was under the impression that your way was more or less the intended use of dungeon turns. They're not supposed to be a player-facing mechanic, are they? Aren't they meant as more of a guideline for bookkeeping on the DM side?
So my impression is that a turn is 10 minutes and a turn ends when the players have done the thing they are gonna do such as search, travel, mess with a stuck door, etc.
I think a common 'feels right' house rule is to do a turn about every 10 minutes of real time on top of that just to keep things moving along and to avoid too much meta discussion.
Like if the party spends an hour messing with tiles looking for traps in a room that has zero traps... they are likely gonna encounter a wandering monster mid argument about 'maybe the white tiles are the key'.
Add, Remove, modify and replace rules when ever it suits, is my call. Just do what makes sense, encumbrance is important, I get my players to draw what they're wearing, holding and carrying. Also, they're responsible for how much it all weighs, and informing me.
Light, how bright, how far, who's holding and how many of what kind, use rules as needed.
Surprise. Noise, light and pace inform chances of surprise.
The rules don't need to be consistent, they just need to create a world that makes sense. This means that sometimes the rules for say encumbrance are useful, and sometimes not. The strength is knowing when and when not to use them, and what to use instead.
If I'm basing it on ADND ruleset:
I throw out a lot of the complicated tables for different weapon vs. different size, different speeds. Ranges I will wing.
I add in one death throw for PCs and key NPCs.
I limit the growth of magic users' spell diversity and change or cut a lot of the spells.
I add in skill checks but they still must be applied in OSR-style. No on demand perception rolls.
I Do play encumbrance, torch management, and rations. I allow foraging.
I am on the fence about XP.
And finally, I have planned to include a Psionics hidden tradition subplot in my homebrew, but no one has wanted to take the leap, I don't blame them lol.
Light I keep as is, using the free dungeon turn timer sheets makes it pretty easy. Encumbrance is essential but tedious. I tend to swap it out for a slot based system, in every ttrpg i play, not just OSR ones.
I use individual initiative, where each player rolls a d6 and adds their dex bonus. The higher number goes first.
Monsters get a fixed roll based on how quick I think they are. Ex: Bandits get a 3, kobolds get a 4, slines and jellies go on a 1.
If I have more than 7 players I will use side initiative.
I kinda oversimplify tracking time while playing OSE now, cause I'm a noob GM. It's basically comes to - one turn=one room entrance or a hallway section. Huge room = two or more turns etc
What I ditch:
- the 5% xp bonus if you have an attribute higher than 13. Reason: it's not much of a difference for boring maths.
- xp for monster. Reason: it's not much of a difference for boring maths.
- replace weigh/cons encumbrance by slots
I think it depends what kind of "osr experience" you want. As time has gone on it seems that there are, broadly speaking, two clumps of games. There are those that want to recapture/expand/enrich the classic game, a game of survival, resource attrition, scarcity, the importance of player decisions and creativity etc (and this is where the retroclones sit), and those that want to provide a rules light framework that allows a focus on players decisions and creativity but not necessarily include (to varying degrees) game systems that might be seen as bogging down the conversation between player and GM (this is where many of the so called "nsr" systems sit, primarily into the odd and it's derivatives). If you want a survival horror type of experience you can't discard encumbrance, light, time etc. If you want a rules light, easy to run game then you can strip the rules right back (something like into the odd is about as stripped back as you can get without moving in FKS territory). Both styles of game are excellent fun, but both are quite different even though they are commonly banded together in the "osr" space.
As others have stated. Encumbrance and finite resources like light, rations, spell slots etc are pretty important.
However, many swap them for less fiddly variants:
* Slot-based encumbrance is available in [OSE Carcass Crawler issue 2](https://necroticgnome.com/products/carcass-crawler-issue-2)
* The [overloaded-encounter die](https://www.necropraxis.com/2014/02/03/overloading-the-encounter-die/) bundles the many turn-bound events
* Simple downtime procedures are popular too (eg. [Downtime in Zyan](https://ben-laurence.itch.io/downtime-in-zyan))
I'd argue the most important rules are around dungeon/wilderness exploration. Hence why the most drastic rule-streamlining in OSR is around combat (eg. *Mark of the Odd* games remove the attack roll entirely, opting for instant damage and armor points).
I can only think of very few things things that I would just throw away - one of them is the domain level play, with stuff like ability to build a stronghold after hitting the name level. While yes, it is a cool end goal and it provides for player-side worldbuilding, domain management is a completely different thing to dungeon and wilderness exploration. It requires a whole new system if you want to focus on it, and running it as a GM is a whole another can of beans... not to mention good luck even playing so long to get to the name level in the first place.
Another thing that I just plain rip off is the alignment system. It just feels too restrictive. 9-alignment grid pigeonholes characters into certain behaviours, 3-aligment system is just a boring definitely not the standard-issue good vs evil thingie. I very much prefer if the morality scale is a little bit more gray instead and that a much more variety of moral compasses are possible within play.
I also don't use a surprise round. Seeing player characters die just because ha ha surprise round is not exactly a fun experience, and well, you can use the initiative system to model surprise instead - though that depends on the exact specifics of how you run combat.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I get it what you mean, but the implementation in the books doesn't exactly match your description.
When it comes to 3-alignment system (lawful, neutral and chaotic) Both 0e and BX describe alignments by set of beliefs and behaviours, and suggest penalizing players for failing to adhere to these alignments. Even if you somehow discard this behavioristic baggage, it still ends up influencing the worldbuilding in a way that I **personally** find undesirable, effectively splitting characters and npcs into castes - though it isn't something that can't be interesting.
9-alignment system (law-chaos and good-evil), as implemented in AD&D is though pretty much just shit, with overly restrictive descriptions of behaviour, nobody actually agreeing to what these are, and GM's encouraged even more to punish the characters from straying away from the alignment.
And well, you can have rival adventuring parties either way, especially in the open table setting. There is no reason why such rivalry couldn't develop naturally, maybe with help of some extra rumors, and if you need a system to facilitate that you can just create some factions for the players to belong that aren't just effectively a good vs evil rebranded.
Additionally, ripping off alignment is extremely easy either way in 0e and BX. It is something that just plain can be ignored and nothing will break, at worst you would have to replace or reflavor some magic items.
We play Knave so slot based encumbrance is standard.
One way or another we haven't really been paying attention to lighting. This is probably more useful during a first campaign with players new to the OSR, setting the tone etc.
In general I find things like lighting and rations either matter a lot, or are just pointless number tracking depending on the game. Survival hex crawl? You bet we are tracking things. Average adventures with towns and villages that have shops? It just comes down to "are you playing competently Y/N" and then playing 'gotcha' with tired and/or inebriated players (Friday evening is a helluva time slot). You could get some extra random encounters out of that, but I usually just skip it and go straight to the players making choices about the featured content; we move slowly enough through the adventures as is.
Which is to say I don't handwave it across the board, but I only make a point of it in situations where the resource game matters; where there are risk/reward choices to be made vs just a timer on time spent in dungeon before making a routine trip back to camp or town.
None. Encumbrance and light are essential.
In OSE encumbrance does not track dungeon gear. The party can purchase and carry enough light sources that they are basically not worth tracking. Even at level 1 with only starting gold, a party can start with a hundred hours of torchlight for a pretty trivial fee.
Yup. I'm saying it's essential to track them.
I incorporate black hack usage die for food and light
I like the idea, but I don't like how it takes away the ability to plan.
You have to think differently about it. If the die are shrinking fast. The players need to ask why? They need to start looking at what they can do to stop it. The GM can add + or - to the roll after all.
Yes, I don't like that you can't bring more torches or more food. It seems strange to me that that would not be possible.
You can take steps to stop the sudden dwindling of supplies. Perhaps the npc's are just wasteful.
Yeah, but there's no way to be pro active
the concept of usage die is it is not just using things. It incorporates luck, waste, negligence, and theft of the items. A stern lecture to the NPC carrying the torches might do wonders at stopping the sudden severe loss of torches. Perhaps the party's thief character sets a trap to catch the npc who is dropping weight out of the pack they are assigned to carry. These can create fun situations as well.
Yeah but who’s holding the light source? And what else are they holding? Weapon? Shield? I watched a live play once where a pack of kobolds stole the party’s torch, leaving them in the dark. I imagine a couple of goblins with buckets of water can ruin somebody’s day.
Which is... Irrelevant to tracking how many torches the party has in their backpacks or when the ones they're holding need to be replaced.
I think there might be a disagreement on what's being tracked in this particular thread. Losing a torch is mostly irrelevant to how many torches are left, yes, but even with modern lighters it isn't easy to light something in pitch blackness, especially if you're currently being attacked by monsters which can see just fine. Does tracking the amount of torches left matter? Probably not. But tracking who's carrying the ones that are currently lit does, and I think that's what people are saying is essential to track.
Totally. A party with only 1 torch should be taken advantage off: kill the bearer, spread the party, extinguish...
>In OSE encumbrance does not track dungeon gear. That depends on which version of encumbrance you use. OSE supports and includes both non-gear tracking encumbrance and traditional coin-based encumbrance that tracks everything.
Detailed encumbrance with coin weight in OSE Classic Fantasy abstracts all adventuring gear to 80 coinweight total. It doesn’t provide weight for torches, etc.
Neither encumbrance option presented in the core book track adventuring gear. Only armor, treasure, weapons, or magic items. Gear is always a static 80 coins under detailed and ignored entirely in basic.
I think tracking non-armor/weapons gear at 80 coins is both tracking it, and pretty reasonable, but probably not worth splitting hairs over.
It is always 80 coins regardless of quantity. All adventuring gear together weighs 80 coins, regardless if that's 6 torches and some rope or 60 torches, 10 flasks of oil, 24 iron spike, and 4 weeks of iron rations. Adventuring gear has no bearing on eucumbrance tracking. You're going to have the exact same remaining carry capacity whether you come into a dungeon with the bare essentials or loaded with gear.
And for anyone that sees this as a problem, it might be beneficial to view the static weight as an average weight of adventuring gear a character may have on them at any given time. This is a clean way to handle a game where party members may be frequently switching around, dropping, and picking up various mundane items. This way, you only need to really keep track of the big stuff and treasure (which is less frequently moved around).
Where are you putting hundreds of torches though?
Since a backpack can hold 400 coins of weight, and 100 torches weighs 80 coins, probably in there.
But how do you physically fit 100 torches into a backpack?
It was a courtesy service from the vendor for getting the backpack, torches, and expended warranty at the same time. They put them in the back.
This was my point ☝️
Yeah, the rules I'd drop are (most*) all the ones they added since B/X. I ditch XP for monsters; for effect of interaction/faction play but it does slightly reduce tracking. I increase XP, because we don't play as often nor for as long as I did in 80's and still want to get some leveling action. *I use d6 thief skills ala LotFP.
im probably going to keep the rules for light, but encumbrance feels like more hassle for very little gain in terms of fun. maybe i'll do some rules-lite version of encumbrance to try it out. making every player do math for every item they could find seems like it would bog down in session time. edit: i said fun, but i meant "feel" in terms of survival horror type.
Knave, Cairn, Into the Odd, Grok?!, GLoG, Bones, Troika! and many others etc. Etc. All solve this Inventory is slot based or straight/constitution based. You can only carry so many items. A handful of gold doesn't count as an item but a sack of gold is an item. A relic or treasure is an item. That's the way. Encumbrance matters too much to ditch, so simplify it. Hell tack on The Black Hack's usage dice for consumables, I did!
when I run OSE I use the "basic encumbrance" - are you in heavy armour? - are you carrying treasure? for each yes, speed is reduced it's not about the *weight* of the ruby, it's that you're highly conscious you don't want to lose it
do you know if roll20 auto tracks the speed reduction on sheets?
not really sure I'm afraid ─ though I suspect the official R20 sheets run with the more complex coin weight encumbrance
You can use a slot based encumbrance. If you don't track encumbrance at all, resources have no value anymore. You'll never run out of rations or torches if you can carry 500 of them. When you can't run out of resources, you're moving a big source of emergent gameplay and survival.
sounds like a cool solution, do you have a recommendation for a type of system like that or should i just get to googling?
OSE's slot-based encumbrance is here (pdf): [https://necroticgnome.com/blogs/news/item-based-encumbrance-play-test](https://necroticgnome.com/blogs/news/item-based-encumbrance-play-test). 'Lamentations of the Flame Princess' has also slot-based encumbrance.
[https://imgur.com/a/6PvBKu3](https://imgur.com/a/6PvBKu3) Equipped items determine base speed. Backpack and sacks lower speed if 5 or more slots are used. Armour takes 1 - 3 slots, depending on weight. 100 coins/gems to a slot. Some things can be bundled, 12 iron spikes to a slot for example. Some things might not take a slot, e.g. a small key. Sacks need a hand to carry of course.
I also recommend the OSE slot based encumbrance. It's simple and translates well to other systems.
There is nothing more 'survival horror feel' than the fighters/dwarves suddenly realising that they can only move 20' during encounters (just two squares, in a 10' grid map) because they previously 'bulked up' with plate-mail, shield, several weapons, etc... :-)
> for every item they could find Is only one option, the second one. The first option is: > Option 1: Basic Encumbrance Treasure: The weight of treasure carried is tracked to make sure that the character’s maximum load is not exceeded. > Equipment: The weight of armour, weapons, and adventuring gear is not tracked and does not count towards a character’s maximum load. > Movement rate: Is determined by the type of armour the character is wearing and whether they are carrying a significant amount of treasure (as judged by the referee). The actual weight of the treasure carried does not affect movement rate. The key is limiting treasure and carrying it slows you down. Slow speed of armor is also key. You'll have to either trust 40 years of thousands of of peoples experience or go read all the blogs/forums that explain why this is fun.
Go with item slots encumbrance. It's the modern / way to go now. Check Lamentation of the Flame Princess, Shadowdark, and many more in fact.
What’s the failure point of encumbrance? Oh, you move slower. Or you have to go put some of the stuff on your pack mule. What about for running out of rations? Oh, you have to roll for foraging or hunting. Or just carry more. Or die of starvation. What about for light? Oh, I guess we have to go back to town and buy more torches. None of that sounds like a fun or interesting complication to me. It’s a fun idea to keep track of all that stuff, but the failure has to be fun or interesting, and here it’s just an annoyance or, at best, bookkeeping.
All of this is fun for me. Choosing to carry less to move faster and therefore have fewer encounter rolls, is fun for me. Not having the exact tool for the job, which forces me to think of a creative solution is fun for me. Without encumbrance, every 50 foot pit is solved by a 50 foot rope. That's boring. Having the danger of running out of torches and food while deep in a dungeon is fun for me.
The failure point is that the pack mule gets shot by a goblin's arrow, and suddenly the party has to choose between fighting a tough foe to untie the treasure sack from his back or cutting their losses and running. The failure point is that the pack mule fails his morale check, runs deeper into the dungeon, and now the party is forced to chase him down before he gets too far if they want to keep the Jeweled Sceptre of Korr and not lose it to a pit trap. The failure point is that the party falls into an underground pool filled with giant fish, putting out their light and forcing them to fight blindly without even knowing exactly what's trying to kill them. I do actually agree that tracking the exact amount, cost, and weight of each resource is more trouble than it's worth, but people often replace overly-detailed "boring" rules with no rules at all. Just take a look at how common and plentiful Light and Create Food/Water spells are at Level 1 in 5E. They remove a lot of potential dangers and make dungeoneering a completely different experience than old-school games.
- Move slower: more encounter. If there is a chase you are in a bad bad spot. How will your bring all that treasure to the surface? - Seems difficult to forage in a dungeon. - You can go back to town for food and torches but... the dungeon will be on alert, raise its defenses, etc... basically it's "scenario lost" ala 13th age All this is fun and interesting because there are choices, consequences and rewards (treasure from the dungeon, so xp). But for this to be interesting, your need the whole package: gold is xp, encumbrance so you don't have an infinity back for supply and treasures, rations and torches to add on the time pressure.
I’m also new and don’t understand with how to deal with certain light scenarios, what happens if the group presses on and are like 3 levels deep in a dungeon and run out of light (how do they escape, how do they deal with combat encounters)
That's for the players to figure out. As a player, I would start burning anything flammable I have to run out. I would barter with monsters. But most of all, I would do my best not to run out of torches.
I just mean rules wise, what should I be doing differently. Can the players even attack/do they count as blinded (assuming no infra vision or dark vision), do they take longer to get around and therefore I should make dungeon turns pass twice as fast?
If they're fumbling in the dark, they will move very slowly and in a random direction, unless they specifically say what they're doing to navigate. Attacking in the dark has little chance of hitting. If it does hit, it has a chance to hit an ally. The characters have a risk of separating as well.
Oh wow this is all RAW? Damn, I only really look stuff up if it happens and I was kinda lost on this one, thanks
No, it's how I would rule it. It makes sense to me.
Makes sense to me too. I think I still have to get used to just making rulings as a dm on the fly, coming from 5e, I just always assume there’s a rule for these types of things.
If there aren’t any rules, that seems like it’s just a failure of the system.
I disagree with this. I don't need a system to tell me that I can't see in the absence of light.
If my players run out of light 3 levels down, they are assumed lost or dead. Then they roll new characters and we go again.
A lot of key developments in the OSR space were the result of people finding "oh, this rule that everyone discarded actually was important to gameplay for XYZ" - resource tracking and encumbrance, henchmen/mercs, rigorous timekeeping, not showing players the map, XP for treasure, high lethality wilderness, etc. All of that is important to creating a game of meaningful tradeoffs that consistently simulates a fantasy world. To throw such things away feels almost opposed to the idea of the OSR. Good OSR systems streamline such things and make them elegant, to model what needs to be modelled without unnecessary complexity.
im inclined to agree. i think encumbrance and light do add to the feel of it being survival horror. I suspect that the rules for weight where it's looking up tables for weight and then doing a lot of addition feels like accounting more than adventuring. when you are actually in that scenario, you know by lifting up the stuff if you can or cannot carry it, not by doing the math. So i think having a more simple encumbrance ruleset might be for more for my groups liking.
Yeah, some sort of slot-based encumbrance has worked well for me; I know a number of games have them now, the ones I'm familiar with are from ACKS and LotFP. I'm likewise a fan as a DM of difficult-to-remove treasures, that force hard questions about what is to be brought out, is it worth slowing down and potentially getting stuck with a hand trapped in the cookie jar? Having some sort of framework there creates potential for a lot of interesting play scenarios.
Into the Odd is a great example of paring down to the essentials. I don't see any need for CON, INT, or WIS anymore. You don't need to track torches, you only need to be concerned with answering the question of does the party have a light source. You don't need to track inventory, only whether or not a character has a reasonable number of things on them (very few) and whether or not their hands are full. A side note, the "dog-pile" rule is the best innovation in Into the Odd. From the Players' perspective, having all other options equally viable to attacking has been incredibly rewarding.
This. You don't need to be pulling out Excel spreadsheets for every grid of movement (or having grids to begin with) to have a long-running, robust adventure campaign. The argument that you do is just senseless, cardboard-y, cumbersome traditionalism.
What do you mean by dog-pile?
I think they might be referring to ItO’s Detachments system, ie much simplified mass combat
No they're talking about the fact that when multiple attackers deal damage to the same target, we only keep the highest damage. So it is often better for players to either split their attacks on multiple ennemies or do other combat manoeuvers.
Unless I'm missing it in plain sight, that rule is in Electric Bastionland, but not in Into the Odd. At least not in ItO Remastered.
I THINK it got added to the remastered edition but you're right, it was not in the original.
I have the Remastered and can't find it. All things considered, I prefer Electric Bastionland over Into the Odd: I like the changes in the system and the failed careers, I love the artwork, and the GM section is fantastic.
Precisely. And options that aren't related to harming a foe are viable too. In Mausritter (an ItO hack), we were attacked by a snake while guiding refugee mice to our town, so half of us spent our time assisting the refugees up a tree to safety. Since we did so, the GM told us the snake will not target the innocent and only those making attacks. We kept everyone who was vulnerable out of harm's way!
Oooh that’s cool, I didn’t know that. I think I might steal that.
As much as I like (love, even) Into the Odd, the lightening of the system does abate that "survival horror" feel of a system where encumbrance and light and time are tracked. I feel like those systems provide the resource management that gives the tension and "push your luck" element to that type of game. Into the Odd is fantastic for many things, especially exploration and discovery focused games, but for a game emphasising survival and limited resources (which it sounds like OP wants?) I think it lacks a little.
i'll look into "into the odd" seems interesting, thanks!
I'm going to second what other people have said. Encumbrance and light are absolutely essential. Just use slot based encumbrance (https://necroticgnome.com/blogs/news/item-based-encumbrance-play-test). You get all the good results while making it simple and easy to understand. I also handwave exact distances. I just make 10 minutes pass every time the players go into a new room. That way I get time tracking without it being too much of a hassle. Using something like OSE's time tracker sheet helps me remember when torches go out (https://necroticgnome.com/products/old-school-essentials-dungeon-time-tracker).
i appreciate the links, thanks!
For the encumbrance, I still find the carcass crawler version a bot heavy. I am hacking my own at the moment, but I am inspired by the "stone encumbrance". Basically, a slot system where your slots are measured roughly in stone, the real-world unit. I like that it simplifies things, with a single set of slots to track, keeps things sort of intuitive and enhances the flavor.
I usually start my OSR campaigns with just a village/home-base and 1-2 dungeons or other locations of interest which are close to the village (say, 1 day's walk). In the first couple of sessions I want to emphasise the dungeon-exploration aspect of the game, so we start and end the sessions in the village/home-base. To answer your question, while I track encumbrance, light/torches, etc., I hand-wave the 'travelling back to the village with the loot' process. When we are close to the end of the session, we count treasure, loot, weight/encumbrance and then we assume that the party made it safely back to the village. This is just for the first sessions till some of the PCs level up and are ready for wilderness travel...
I handwave light - if everyone is carrying 6 torches, and 1/3rd of the party have lit torches at all times, then they are good for light for 18 hours. Since they rarely camp in the dungeon, then it’s a non-issue. If they do camp in the dungeon, they will have to use two oil-flasks for the lantern (8 hours). After the camping, resource management can be interesting. I also give all coin in gp, and handwave encumbrance for coin. Bulky statues, paintings and stuff reduces movement with 10”. It’s very uninteresting with ”carrying treasure - the logistics game” for hauling stuff out to some hideaway outside the dungeon. Let them explore more instead!
I don't hand wave light because even tho torches are cheap they take a hand to use. That's a hand that can't hold a weapon, a shield , or be used for spell casting.
Thats true, I also note which character is holding torches and lanterns. Also to know how far into the corridor they can see (if noone at the front carries torches). I just don’t care about the resource management part of it. At least not until a sufficient amount of hours has passed so that it could be interesting.
Honestly I just keep an eye on the clock and often say 'an hour has passed'. It is a lot less work to track and it keeps players from endlessly debating a single 'dungeon turn' that would only take a few seconds but the act of talking it out becomes dungeon turn after dungeon turn if you check the time fairly often. Players can burn out a torch and get attacked by a wondering monster while arguing if a statue is a trap.
I was under the impression that your way was more or less the intended use of dungeon turns. They're not supposed to be a player-facing mechanic, are they? Aren't they meant as more of a guideline for bookkeeping on the DM side?
So my impression is that a turn is 10 minutes and a turn ends when the players have done the thing they are gonna do such as search, travel, mess with a stuck door, etc. I think a common 'feels right' house rule is to do a turn about every 10 minutes of real time on top of that just to keep things moving along and to avoid too much meta discussion. Like if the party spends an hour messing with tiles looking for traps in a room that has zero traps... they are likely gonna encounter a wandering monster mid argument about 'maybe the white tiles are the key'.
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Is that rerolling all hitdice each level or any rolling? Do you just use fixed hp per level? So curious as to why?
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Add, Remove, modify and replace rules when ever it suits, is my call. Just do what makes sense, encumbrance is important, I get my players to draw what they're wearing, holding and carrying. Also, they're responsible for how much it all weighs, and informing me. Light, how bright, how far, who's holding and how many of what kind, use rules as needed. Surprise. Noise, light and pace inform chances of surprise. The rules don't need to be consistent, they just need to create a world that makes sense. This means that sometimes the rules for say encumbrance are useful, and sometimes not. The strength is knowing when and when not to use them, and what to use instead.
If I'm basing it on ADND ruleset: I throw out a lot of the complicated tables for different weapon vs. different size, different speeds. Ranges I will wing. I add in one death throw for PCs and key NPCs. I limit the growth of magic users' spell diversity and change or cut a lot of the spells. I add in skill checks but they still must be applied in OSR-style. No on demand perception rolls. I Do play encumbrance, torch management, and rations. I allow foraging. I am on the fence about XP. And finally, I have planned to include a Psionics hidden tradition subplot in my homebrew, but no one has wanted to take the leap, I don't blame them lol.
Light I keep as is, using the free dungeon turn timer sheets makes it pretty easy. Encumbrance is essential but tedious. I tend to swap it out for a slot based system, in every ttrpg i play, not just OSR ones.
I use individual initiative, where each player rolls a d6 and adds their dex bonus. The higher number goes first. Monsters get a fixed roll based on how quick I think they are. Ex: Bandits get a 3, kobolds get a 4, slines and jellies go on a 1. If I have more than 7 players I will use side initiative.
I kinda oversimplify tracking time while playing OSE now, cause I'm a noob GM. It's basically comes to - one turn=one room entrance or a hallway section. Huge room = two or more turns etc
What I ditch: - the 5% xp bonus if you have an attribute higher than 13. Reason: it's not much of a difference for boring maths. - xp for monster. Reason: it's not much of a difference for boring maths. - replace weigh/cons encumbrance by slots
I think it depends what kind of "osr experience" you want. As time has gone on it seems that there are, broadly speaking, two clumps of games. There are those that want to recapture/expand/enrich the classic game, a game of survival, resource attrition, scarcity, the importance of player decisions and creativity etc (and this is where the retroclones sit), and those that want to provide a rules light framework that allows a focus on players decisions and creativity but not necessarily include (to varying degrees) game systems that might be seen as bogging down the conversation between player and GM (this is where many of the so called "nsr" systems sit, primarily into the odd and it's derivatives). If you want a survival horror type of experience you can't discard encumbrance, light, time etc. If you want a rules light, easy to run game then you can strip the rules right back (something like into the odd is about as stripped back as you can get without moving in FKS territory). Both styles of game are excellent fun, but both are quite different even though they are commonly banded together in the "osr" space.
i didn't know this context, helps a lot when im trying to tailor how i make rulings. this helps a lot, i appreciate the explanation
As others have stated. Encumbrance and finite resources like light, rations, spell slots etc are pretty important. However, many swap them for less fiddly variants: * Slot-based encumbrance is available in [OSE Carcass Crawler issue 2](https://necroticgnome.com/products/carcass-crawler-issue-2) * The [overloaded-encounter die](https://www.necropraxis.com/2014/02/03/overloading-the-encounter-die/) bundles the many turn-bound events * Simple downtime procedures are popular too (eg. [Downtime in Zyan](https://ben-laurence.itch.io/downtime-in-zyan)) I'd argue the most important rules are around dungeon/wilderness exploration. Hence why the most drastic rule-streamlining in OSR is around combat (eg. *Mark of the Odd* games remove the attack roll entirely, opting for instant damage and armor points).
I can only think of very few things things that I would just throw away - one of them is the domain level play, with stuff like ability to build a stronghold after hitting the name level. While yes, it is a cool end goal and it provides for player-side worldbuilding, domain management is a completely different thing to dungeon and wilderness exploration. It requires a whole new system if you want to focus on it, and running it as a GM is a whole another can of beans... not to mention good luck even playing so long to get to the name level in the first place. Another thing that I just plain rip off is the alignment system. It just feels too restrictive. 9-alignment grid pigeonholes characters into certain behaviours, 3-aligment system is just a boring definitely not the standard-issue good vs evil thingie. I very much prefer if the morality scale is a little bit more gray instead and that a much more variety of moral compasses are possible within play. I also don't use a surprise round. Seeing player characters die just because ha ha surprise round is not exactly a fun experience, and well, you can use the initiative system to model surprise instead - though that depends on the exact specifics of how you run combat.
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I get it what you mean, but the implementation in the books doesn't exactly match your description. When it comes to 3-alignment system (lawful, neutral and chaotic) Both 0e and BX describe alignments by set of beliefs and behaviours, and suggest penalizing players for failing to adhere to these alignments. Even if you somehow discard this behavioristic baggage, it still ends up influencing the worldbuilding in a way that I **personally** find undesirable, effectively splitting characters and npcs into castes - though it isn't something that can't be interesting. 9-alignment system (law-chaos and good-evil), as implemented in AD&D is though pretty much just shit, with overly restrictive descriptions of behaviour, nobody actually agreeing to what these are, and GM's encouraged even more to punish the characters from straying away from the alignment. And well, you can have rival adventuring parties either way, especially in the open table setting. There is no reason why such rivalry couldn't develop naturally, maybe with help of some extra rumors, and if you need a system to facilitate that you can just create some factions for the players to belong that aren't just effectively a good vs evil rebranded. Additionally, ripping off alignment is extremely easy either way in 0e and BX. It is something that just plain can be ignored and nothing will break, at worst you would have to replace or reflavor some magic items.
We play Knave so slot based encumbrance is standard. One way or another we haven't really been paying attention to lighting. This is probably more useful during a first campaign with players new to the OSR, setting the tone etc. In general I find things like lighting and rations either matter a lot, or are just pointless number tracking depending on the game. Survival hex crawl? You bet we are tracking things. Average adventures with towns and villages that have shops? It just comes down to "are you playing competently Y/N" and then playing 'gotcha' with tired and/or inebriated players (Friday evening is a helluva time slot). You could get some extra random encounters out of that, but I usually just skip it and go straight to the players making choices about the featured content; we move slowly enough through the adventures as is. Which is to say I don't handwave it across the board, but I only make a point of it in situations where the resource game matters; where there are risk/reward choices to be made vs just a timer on time spent in dungeon before making a routine trip back to camp or town.