Blades Runner
Posts: 616
Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19
Inventory Management Revisited
The problem:
Inventory management is a hassle. I won't go into all the gory details why, because many reasons have been stated why by myself and others. One of the largest issues with changing it surrounds power creep issues of allowing everyone access to all items at all times (or nearly so), leading to various complicated solutions such as the magic bag which takes time to access. Item weight used to play a large role in mitigating power creep by acting as a limiting factor, but it was itself a tedious mechanism, from all sides.
New solution:
Limit the number of items a character can carry by category type. For example, X pieces of armor. X being a number which would need to be worked out. I'm not attempting to propose all exact quantities now, but I'd be willing to work on them if the general idea was well received. From a flavor standpoint, it seems intuitive, if not sensible that a character shouldn't be allowed to carry 28 sets of plate mail. On the other hand, in the scrolls category, a character could (and in my opinion) be able to carry an unlimited number of scrolls. Scrolls represent a large number of items with mostly strategic, versus tactical uses (i.e. enchant weapon, enchant armour, amnesia.) I would argue that potion types should also be unlimited. Also, like scrolls there are some strategic items (i.e. mutation, experience.)
Pros:
Relatively simple to understand, and perhaps to implement. It seems intuitive from a flavor standpoint.
Cons:
Certain races and combinations do not use certain items, which is mostly considered a disadvantage, but it also has the side effect of creating more space for other items. Mummies are a good example of this. Because they cannot drink potions, they generally are able to carry more items for evocations. I don't have a solution to offset this change of balance offhand, but I'm not sure if the extra inventory space was actually intended to be an incidental advantage or simply became one for lack of a system to prevent it. If the latter, then this con would become a pro, thus achieving that racial limitations are not also advantages.
Special considerations:
A few tweaks to the system which may be needed come to mind. Octopodes, for instance, could be bound by the limit of # of rings they could carry by adding total number of rings+armour they could carry together as total rings.
Regarding ranged ammo, I think that branded ammo should not count as an additional type. It does not make sense to me, that if I could carry 1,000 javelins, that I might not be able to carry 1 javelin, but then not be able to pick up a second javelin with poison on it. The same applies to tomahawks. Depending on the total number of ammunition types which a character could carry, I do see that this change could amount to some power creep, but perhaps not if the character can only carry 1 or 2 ammunition types in total, thus offsetting some advantage. It was a lovely day when launcher branded ammo went away, too bad that there isn't an equivalent solution for throwing, because that was a more elegant solution.
Evocable items are just a mess. I typically only carry a wand of digging and do not train evocations anymore for the simple reason that for me, there often isn't enough room in inventory to make training the skill worthwhile. If this category was limited to X number of items, independent of the rest of inventory, it could always have value (although true that then this might limit characters who were skilled to take advantage of a heavily populated evocations inventory.)
If there is any interest in this proposal, I'd be willing to give the details some more thought.