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.

Look, 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.

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.

Hell, inventory management by space and encumbrance have been a thing for all the years I have played rpgs. Not having either seems more like the exception to me.

I have never had a door stolen. We have to do some paperwork to steal a stone statue that insulted you and then swung it’s arms to fight you. But they used it as the figurehead on their ship

I only do special ammo. I also make it one time use do make it simple to track. Gone on a hit but not on a miss

True but how many jars can you carry compared to doors?

Assuming it works, they are clearly not beyond help. If you find yourself constantly forgetting to click the button, there’s no shame in finding some workaround. And solving small problems is half the fun of being a programmer.

Guess it depends who you’re playing with. I play with my friends and we’re comfortable enough with each other to get one another’s humor and do some light ribbing, but I suppose that’s not everyone’s experience.

No, the best items in the game are enchanted by the player easily.

Okay so they’re still not coming from the merchants, so having a lot of gold still isn’t messing up the “economy”. You have to acquire good equipment to enchant and track down the spells and powerful enough souls to make something useful. Merchant equipment stops at mid tier stuff. You have to go exploring to get the highest tier stuff. You don’t need a ton of gold for any of that.

I agree selling stuff was annoying, but it wasn’t that hard.

And you are arguing that is good game design? I don’t want to waste time doing tedious time consuming shit. I want to do cool challenging things. I’m playing games to have fun. If the obstacles put in my way to try and force me to play the way the devs want are just taking more time they’re not really obstacles, they’re just annoying and un-fun.

The clothing with the best enchantability are exquisite clothes. They can be purchased from merchants. You can also pay merchants to do the enchanting instead of doing it yourself (expensive, but when money isn’t an issue it doesn’t matter).

And you are arguing that is good game design?

When did I say that? I only said that selling items is something that’s done by almost all players. Sure, the system sucks to engage with, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t an option.

I don’t want to waste time doing tedious time consuming shit. I want to do cool challenging things. I’m playing games to have fun.

You’re literally the one who just said they return to dungeons they already finished to clear out almost valueless items instead of going and doing actual content. Be consistent at least.

Anyway, the point is that balancing the player economy is important so they can actually challenge you and do interesting things. If you can just purchase power, and money is easily available, then there’s no challenge. If you can’t purchase power then money is useless; and money is usually the reward for doing content.

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.

That’s when you close it. Then it’s no longer ajar

Fair!

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.