Knave+Troika Inventory for All: an Optional Rule

Overall I like this rules module. Could someone write it themself for free? Sure, especially since the text of Troika and Knave are freely available. But hopefully this review/comment gives you an idea of whether $2 is worth the inspiration and labour saved.

First, some notes about format. 3 (landscape-oriented) pages, 650 words, simple two-column layout double line spaced. Easy to read, but a bit wasteful to print. Copy-pastes to a text editor without any text flow errors, so screen readers should be fine with it.

It's impossible to write a concise system that can effortlessly plug into *every* OSR game, but this gives enough ideas that a playgroup can decide how to interpret or tweak various things.

Some noteworthy things:

• Item slots equals your Str score. For games with only a *modifier* (e.g. World of Dungeons) I'd say slots = 10 + Str mod. Note that unlike Knave, where the minimum score is 11, B/X or any 3d6-in-order system can produce characters who are very limited in carry capacity.
• You *can* carry more stuff than your item slots, with escalating penalties to all rolls. Penalty to rolls obviously has different effects depending on what players roll for -- it's worse in The Black Hack or WoDu than for, say, a B/X magic-user.
• It borrows Troika's (and Torchbearer, I think?) mechanic of having to roll whenever you want to retrieve items. The order of item slots matters.
• Armour takes up 1 slot per bonus it gives. This is probably a bit much for "armour reduces to-hit" systems, I'd make it take 1 slot per +2 bonus to Armour Class. For "armour as damage reduction" (Into the Odd) or "armour as ablative HP" (The Black Hack 1e) you might need to tweak this ratio.
• There's good guidelines for deciding how many slots a non-armour item takes. Knave partly leaves it up to the GM, so it's nice to have some more concrete advice here.
• Damage takes up item slots! 1 hp per slot feels very inappropriate for B/X, to be fair the author points this out and offers solutions. But it could work with Jared's The Vanilla Game, other games with Vitality/Wounds, games with less granular HP, or with HP that never scales.
• There are items (magic backpacks, bandoliers) that either adjust your carry capacity or your roll to retrieve things.

A simple and elegant design . Nice work . Thumbs up emoji

Often enough efficiency is overlooked as "simple". 10/10 for this little ruleset that mechanically makes a lot of sense and eliminates the whole "This weighs 1.5 pounds? Wait, let me calculate everything in my inventory to see if I can carry it..."

This also would allow for many fun infographics drawn on character sheets of inventory space.