A downloadable optional rule

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This  is an inventory system that combines the best features from those of about four different games (most famous among them, Troika and Knave) and an uncertain number of blog-posts, to create a system that

  • works with the game that you already play (assuming that that game has Strength, Dexterity, and HP in roughly their normal ranges for D&D or OSR)
  • provides interesting choices in play
  • makes multiple elements of play impact on inventory management
  • is fairly realistic
  • is simple to use and simple to learn

It reduces inventory down to a slot system, rather than a weight one, makes over-encumbrance much simpler, and makes dexterity important for getting items out during combat. Additionally, it simplifies rules for armor penalties, and gives the injury and exhaustion represented by the loss of HP an impact on how much you can efficiently carry. 

(While this is inspired by Troika, it is not compatible with it without some hacking)

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

Knave+Troika Inventory for All_ an Optional Rule for D&D-like and OSR Games.pdf 81 kB

Comments

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(+4)(-2)

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.
(+1)(-1)

Thank you for the review :) 

(+1)(-1)

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

(+1)(-1)

Aww, thank you so much! :)

Your are most welcome . Credit where it's due 

Deleted 3 years ago
(+1)(-2)

Thank you so much! I basically live for this praise, lol :) 

And yeah, I think that it's probably going to be similar to a lot of slot-based systems. It's a combination of a bunch of features that were individually great elsewhere. It's proudly un-innovative, in the sense that it's the product of me reading a bunch of different games and blogposts, with like a dozen different unique-ish OSR inventory systems between them, and realizing that most of them could work together... with some tweaking.

(+2)(-2)

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.

(+2)(-1)

Thank you so much! :)