There’s a moment when it can add tension. You find three silver arrows in an old fort, hole up for the night, and then hear the horrible howl of a werewolf ring out.

Or you’re lost in the desert, trying to ration your water until you can find an oasis.

I’ve played Westmarches games where you do a little pre-adventure “we need to go X hexes so we’re wanting Y supplies to get there and back”. But its more a cost of failure than a drama element.

It’s definitely not “non-binary”. Can we agree on that?

Converts my one electrum to 50 cp. Now I have infinite money!

You can keep cyanide in your digestive tract so that she/he can make inventory tracking a complete non-issue for you specifically ️

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.

Or you could save on rolls and say you’re out of arrows on a natural 1.

Brilliant. Well done.

thanks, I have my moments.

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?

And that’s how the party ends up on the run for counterfeiting.

the big thing is just that your inventory management can just be a number and you don’t have to think so hard about it if that’s not something you or your players find joy in while playing make believe together

Mostly, I agree. However, part of why it has a cost is to be a sink for gold. Sure, it’s not much, but it does add up. However, there are better ways to handle it than to track arrows.

Just make your players occasionally pay for upkeep of their gear when they’re in town. This could be themes as repairs for weapons an armor, more arrows, spellcasting supplies, food, etc. This does two things. You can give them more value in rewards and it makes them feel like they’re actually adventurers, not just game characters.

Alternatively, scale rewards down. They don’t have to know about it, but if they’re not paying for supplies then they’re going to get more value than is expected (by the rules).

Or, the final option, just ignore it. It theoretically adds up to a lot of value over the course of the game, especially for spellcasting, but who cares? If you notice they have enough money that they stop worrying about it then you can do something.

We just buy 50 rations and a barrel of booze session 1 and it some how never runs out unless there’s a crazy party. I think once we had some travel session that fast forward months of travel where he managed resources for a bit.

Every group I’ve been in the archers just bought more than they could ever use and someone in the party could carry the extras. Like every time they go back to town they drop 5 gp for 100 arrows.

I’m honored to have shared the decade occurrence with you

I mean, if we’re taking zeros and ones, yeah it’s definitely binary. If we’re talking gender, it’s absolutely non-binary.

Hence the “ “ The virtue signaling period is over mate.

The AI has rotted your brain man. Tracking arrows, what this entire post is about, doesn’t need a fucking LLM. It needs tally marks on a sheet of paper, at most.

Regarding inventory management in general: Why the fuck would you ever use an LLM for something you can do in Notepad? Want to be fancy? Use More Purple More Better’s editable PDF player sheet templates. You can load in sourcebook data from external sources easily and have everything from every sourcebook at your fingertips. And you can still enter custom shit like custom magical items easily.

We play with the we don’t track arrows and encumbrance unless you start trying to steal all the doors in the dungeon. The stealing of doors did happen with a group before I joined. We keep the rule just in case