Battle is a fun time to discover your auto-renew didn’t work and your arrows will now only shoot 3 feet before disappearing.

…wait I think I’m ready to DM

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.

I have an invisible mage hand that can pick the keys out of the jailers pocket. If you want me to roll for collecting every arrow… I will

One dice at a time

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 don’t think you understand game design if you can’t understand what’s meant by “ruining the economy.” It means that the player gets so much money that there’s essentially no use for it anymore. They can buy anything that’s available without concern. For example, in Morrowind you can craft potions with ridiculous value, then use that to pay for levels from trainers and buy the best items, then pay for enchanting to make them even better. It trivializes the game.

The only option at that point is to just limit what can be purchased. That’s a much worse solution than balancing the game’s economy so the player has options to spend money on, but critically they can’t buy everything. Video games are about making decisions. If you don’t have to decide anything than why not just watch a movie? The game needs to present you with options, and you need to choose what you will and won’t do. The economy is a great place this can happen in a game that’s balanced well.

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.

Bows are OP until you have limited arrows

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.

I don’t ask characters to keep track of ammunition, but if they are using a crossbow or some type of gun, I will absolutely penalize them for not remembering to reload between combat. Or forgetting to retrieve thrown weapons. Its just always funny in an evil sort of way.

“I’m going to attack the troll!”

“Alright, how do you want to attack?”

“I’m going to throw my enchanted spear at it!”

“Your spear is a level down, back where you last threw it when fighting those goblins earlier.”

Shocked pickachu face

Eh, didn’t have better things to do at the time, and wanted to shout out MPMB’s PDFs. Amazing tool.

Arrow! Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true King under the Mountain, go now and speed well"

DM: “Okay, fine. But after this you can’t use it again.”

I memorize which items have a good weight to value ratio and don’t pick up the junk. When I was young I would take everything in multiple trips, but I ain’t got time for that now.

Morrowind you can craft potions with ridiculous value, then use that to pay for levels from trainers and buy the best items

Did you actually play Morrowind? I can’t think of a single one of the best items in Morrowind that was available for sale. You either had to steal them or they were loot. Also most of the vendors in that game were pretty broke. To sell anything of “ridiculous value” You had to find the mudcrab merchant out in the middle of nowhere. Gold didn’t trivialize that game at all. Exploiting alchemy did.

No, the best items in the game are enchanted by the player easily. It’s not required, but enchanting you can create better magical items than are available to find, and with the specific enchantments that you want.

I agree selling stuff was annoying, but it wasn’t that hard. You just sell as much as you can and buy back other light valuables. Then when you buy something you use the valuables first.

If they’re talking discord specifically I’ve seen bots in servers that track inventory for you. Just click a button. If they can be arsed to do that then they’re truly beyond help.

One campaign I ran devolved into that. The players had formed an elaborate money laundering and counterfeit scheme involving illusions and extremely high rolls to sell lesser items as the more expensive versions. Was a lot of fun.

But jars aren’t worth as much as doors

I’ve played with someone like this once. It is infuriating to have to halt the flow of the action just so that everyone can take their time and describe shitty little menial tasks they are doing and that should just be left to reasonable expectation so that they don’t give their petty DM the oppotunity to fuck them later.

There are so many ways to create fun challenges for players, being anally adversarial with the players is not one of them. They only person deriving joy from that is the shitty sadistic DM.

Sorry for the very personal attack, but bruh… I got triggerd just by reading your last two sentences.

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.

I keep track of ammo until it becomes clear it becomes a non issue (ie: when the party gets rich enough that it doesn’t matter.)

Then at this point I only keep track of special ammo.