Friday, April 23, 2021

Bundling Inventory

kyleferrin:
“Taking a quick break from adventuring to check the mail
”

An idea for a sort-of slot based inventory system I struck upon. Currently still in WIP phase.

A Bundling Inventory

All characters have 8 (or maybe 10) slots in their inventory. All items take up one slot. However you can 'bundle' items together if it would make sense to do so. Bundled items take time to retrieve and un-bundle. There are no fixed rules for this, use common sense and reference from your real life. For example you could use your helmet to carry a flask of holy water and some river stones. Or you could bundle three spears together to fill only one slot. A backpack might fit a good number of small items.

Assume that people do not have pockets (for most of human history people have not in fact had pockets in their clothes), so everything must be worn, carried, or held in something else.

An Example Inventory Of Some Dungeoneer --

1. Maille Hauberk
2. Skull of Saint Thomas (magic)
3. Shortsword
4. Backback; Soap; Journal; Purse; Bedroll; Torches; Stolen Gem
5. Helmet; Bag of Marbles; Flask of Holy Water
6. Knife; More Knife
7. Rope, 50ft
8. 

Thoughts on how to improve this?
(art is Kyle Ferrin

3 comments:

  1. *yoink*

    What's that? Oh, just the sound of me stealing this for my own homebrew. This seems like an excellent way to handle "readied" and "stowed" items without designating X slots as easily accessible or otherwise; bundled items take 1 round to access, everything else is fair game.

    I'm not sure if "everything must be worn, carried, or held in something else" necessarily tracks; you aren't wearing the helmet with the bag of marbles in it, so where is it?

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  2. Interesting!

    Maybe throw in something about an "inventory unit" (or whatever" being equal to a closed fist, so that you can specifically say that the helmet holding 0.5 units of river pebbles or what-have-you. This gives everyone a sense of how many pebbles are in the helmet (and therefore how much room is left), without having to be too exact (19 pebbles with an average size of...).

    I am interested to see where this goes as you continue to work ono it.

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  3. Ooooh. I like this, it feels good. You could add in a encumbrance score based on your number of bundles, maybe your encumbrance score is equal to the number of bundles of three or more items you are carrying and a backpack would be able to carry 6 items, anymore and it takes a full round to get the item out rather than a half round or something. I don't think there should be too much of a problem allowing pockets as the downside is not wearing any armour.

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