Im a forever DM. We play DND for fun not inventory management, anything tedious like that just isn’t what I want to spend time in a game on.
Yeah, it’s like encumberance in video games. Usually just makes things tedious and if there’s no work around it stops being fun.
I don’t mind encumberance that much. I think it’s necessary if you’re making any attempt at balancing the economy. Without it the player returns back to town with every bit of loot from the dungeon to sell, and the economy doesn’t matter anymore.
However, any game that has an encumberance mechanic absolutely has to have a weight/value sort and display. I don’t know why this is so hard for them to implement. Bethesda games never do, and I’m playing Tainted Grail (I’ve heard lots of good things, and it’s alright so far) and it doesn’t. With any amount of playtesting they’d get overencumbered, try to figure out what to drop and instantly realize they want to drop the highest weight/value items, and there’s no way to view this! How do you not add it?
Easy fix: Have more money as loot instead of otherwise nearly worthless items that sell for small amounts of money for flavor.
Well, for most games it isn’t useless items. Most of it just isn’t useful to you. Either your gear is better, or it’s for a combat style you don’t use, or it’s consumables like potions.
I’m talking about the things you can’t use, like bowls and trinkets and other stuff that games frequently include as ‘white’ items that literally cannot be used. Those things that exist to be sold to vendors.
They have been in many of the rpgs I have played. In the rpgs that don’t have them, there isn’t a vendor that buys stuff and no ‘economy’ that exists.
That’s almost exclusively a Bethesda thing, at least to the extent it’s an issue. Technically it’s in Tainted Grail some, and Larian games a very small amount, but never in enough quantity or weight to be an issue, nor are they ever worth enough to bother with.
We are talking about the games that have those things when saying they are an issue. Of course it isn’t an issue in games that don’t have it, but when it exists it absolutely is an issue, especially when game mechanics include a ‘loot all’ option. There you need to drop what you don’t want.
You started by saying Bethesda games don’t have encumbrance but Skyrim was the first game I thought of that had stuff you couldn’t use but had some kind of value and weight and encumbrance was a huge part of Skyrim when wearing heavy armor. There is even a whole strategy of figuring out value for the weight to increase the amount of value you get when selling. Baldur’s Gate 3 and I assume earlier ones have the same thing. The Witcher 3 has it. Any crafting game like Subnautica and survival games like Valhiem have it.
Hell, inventory management by space and encumbrance have been a thing for all the years I have played action, survival, and exploration rpgs. Not having either seems more like the exception to me.
In SP RPG games it’s stupid. I’m just going to make however many trips back and forth it takes to empty the dungeon anyway. Might as well let me do it in one shot so I can get on to the next thing. I get it in survival crafting type games (within reason) but no reason games like skyrim or fallout need an encumbrance mechanic when you need a fuckload of stuff to level your crafting skills.
Will you really go back? I suspect that 99.99% of players won’t. It’s more effective to go somewhere new, where you get XP, a fresh shot at better loot, and maybe different quests.
Sure, you can ruin the economy in many ways, such as hoovering up every bit of loot. It isn’t balanced around that though, and can’t be. It’s the correct assumption almost always that players won’t return for loot that was left, because it’s less valuable than doing a new dungeon.
Yes, I go back. Why would I say it’s annoying and wastes a ton of time if I didn’t have experience with it? I’ve had a lot of conversations with other people who are the same way so I think you are underestimating how annoying it is. As far as moving on to the next place, what do you get? One boss chest, with a single magic item that may or may not be good for you? You still have to pick up the incedental crap to sell for gold and crafting materials. If you just rely on the few decent items you get that would take even longer. Regardless, there’s no economy to ruin in games like skyrim or fallout. You’re the only one there with a bunch of mindless NPCs, they don’t trade with each other and their inventory resets after a few days. Selling them a ton of crap is completely meaningless to the world as a whole.
You can keep ChatGPT on in the background so that she/he can keep inventory for you guys. Like a mystical miserable fuck.
Why would you use ChatGPT to emulate a word processor? You get all the functionality you need without ever hitting enter.
I’m wondering if they mean have ChatGPT reading the messages in Discord and automatically tracking it? It should be able to do that, but I’m not sure about the specifics. And it’s not something LLMs are good at, so you have to be able to work around it. It would basically need to notice whenever you use an item, then tell something else to remove that from you inventory.
that assumes that all discussion is made via text chat and not voice chat. Any item usage that goes un-typed is lost.
True. Also, it assumes that the parent commenter was being at least a little bit reasonable and trying to work backwards from there. Maybe I should have asked them if that’s what they were doing.
My DM never gave a shit or required me to buy arrows. I tracked them sometimes anyway, but we always just shrugged and said I either fletched my own during downtime, or that arrows were included in general party upkeep/funds.
Bows are OP until you have limited arrows
There are some formats where inventory management becomes interesting again. We tried doing a Hexcrawl earlier this year and there was a lot of interesting gameplay to be had in the risk/reward management of how many supplies they wanted to carry vs how much they wanted to invest in pack animals, limiting their ability to carry loot back, carrying this vs that, guessing how much they’ll use before they can resupply or where future resupplies might be, gambling on whether to press forward and risk running out or turn back, that kind of thing. It’s just the more currently popular adventure structures right now (eg linear or branching narratives) where inventory tracking is superfluous.
