Coins, Weight, and Encumbrance

*Edit: What is up with all these major content creators discussing topics right before I do? 😂 I wrote this post two weeks ago, but then Ben Milton from Questing Beast made a video on Encumbrance here. Anyway, his video is really good and you should check it out.*

Encumbrance: you either use it or you don’t.

And among those tables that do use encumbrance, it seems like there are as many variant encumbrance systems as there are gaming tables.

In this article, I think through the problem of encumbrance and offer my two copper pieces on it. You can decide for yourself whether to count them as part of your inventory or not 😉

Encumbrance is one of those things I always felt like I should be tracking as a referee… but never really managed to do. In high school and college, we largely ignored it.

As I gained experience, I tried going by-the-book. I resented the finicky, large-number math that came from totaling up lots of incidental item weights. I could tell that most of my players resented it, too. I started to experiment with some variant encumbrance rules for 5e and Pathfinder, but nothing ever really seemed to stick.

Eventually, encumbrance came to the forefront of my mind during our Dolmenwood game. We decided to use advancement based on “Treasure for XP,” at which point the amount of treasure the PCs could reasonably carry became very relevant. Exactly how much was a reasonable amount of gold to fit in a backpack?

Fortunately, I wasn’t the first person to ask this question. A lot of people, much more literate in math than I, already did work to figure this out.

Ipsimus Arcanus at the Dungeon Master’s Workshop did some work to figure out what gold, silver, and copper coins would look like in real life (assuming these precious metals have the same density in your fantasy world as they do in real life).

According to Arcanus, assuming all denominations of coin are 50 coins to a pound, gold coins would be about three-quarters of an inch in diameter and 1/16^th of an inch thick. Copper and silver coins would each be the same thickness and be slightly more than an inch in diameter.

And Arcanus points out in this same article how laughably outlandish the idea of a bathtub-sized pirate chest of treasure is, given these assumptions. Such a chest would hold almost 680,000 gold coins and weigh six imperial tons!

Reading Arcanus’ article really put things into perspective for me. I realized exactly how absurd it was for a PC to carry around thousands of coins without difficulty.

And I realize it's a fantasy game about dragons and magic – it’s not exactly realistic – and if that’s the kind of game you want to run, good on you! For myself, I wanted to play a game that was intentionally fantastical – not conveniently so.

Note that the above calculations use the 5^th edition assumption of 50 coins to a pound. B/X D&D instead operates with the assumption of 10 coins to a pound, which creates coins approximately the size of a U.S. silver dollar (as described here on the Blog of Holding). Personally, I prefer the idea of 50 coins to a pound much more. It seems more “grounded.”

A bit more about old-school encumbrance: Old School Essentials (my reference point for B/X D&D), encumbrance is presented as an optional rule. OSE says that, if encumbrance is used, the amount of treasure a PC carries should always be tracked. OSE uses “coins” as a unit to determine encumbrance; every piece of equipment has its encumbrance value listed in coins. With regards to equipment, there are two ways to track it.

The first option ignores the weight of armor, weapons, and gear. PCs simply alter their movement speed dependent on 1. the armor they wear and 2. if the referee says they are carrying “a significant amount of treasure.”

The second option counts the weight of armor and weapons individually. Miscellaneous adventuring gear is typically counted as 80 coin weight. The characters then alter their movement rate based on the total weight of the treasure, weapons, and armor they carry.

Regardless of the option used, a PC can never move while carrying more than 1600 coins.

It's notable that encumbrance has little other mechanical effect that movement rate. Obviously, the referee would be within their rights to include other effects, as necessary. But encumbrance doesn't penalize attack rolls or saving throws, rules-as-written. 

I bring all of this up to emphasize how, in B/X D&D, the entire point of encumbrance was to moderate how much treasure the PCs could carry. In each of the rules variants above, the thing that gets measured with the most granularity is the treasure the PCs find. Hell - encumbrance itself is even measured in “coins,” rather than pounds.

In my mind, encumbrance likely diminished in importance at gaming tables once treasure no longer provided the primary means of advancement. When “gold for XP” became “combat for XP,” counting how much stuff you carried became much less important. And I'm not the only one who thinks this - Jospeh Mohr suggested something similar in his post here.

Furthermore – but perhaps less importantly – I also think the diminishing importance of encumbrance happened alongside an increase in the abilities of players. Once light became a cantrip player characters could cast an unlimited number of times per day, the number of torches or amount of oil you carried didn’t matter as much.

Really, encumbrance and inventory systems belong in a game about careful resource management and exploration (such as old-school D&D), not games about action heroes going around and beating up bad guys.

As another tangential thought, I wanted to add that encumbrance (and counting coins) makes gems and jewelry that much more important. When you actually care about how much coins weigh, they become one of the least efficient ways to carry treasure. Gems and jewelry are much more “value-dense,” by comparison. And that invites you (as the referee) to include other, more interesting forms of treasure for players to find and claim.

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So, you’ve decided you want to track encumbrance. How should you do it?

I don’t know. It probably depends on the rules system you use and your personal preference.

The system I use presently use is this:

·         Provided they have a backpack, each PC possesses a number of Slots equal to their Strength score. PCs without a backpack have half as many slots.

·         Most items take up one Slot. Especially heavy or bulky items may occupy more, at the referee’s discretion. Light armor takes one, medium armor two, and heavy armor three.

·         Small items (ex. torches, scrolls, rations) may be bundled into groups of 3 to a slot. (You could do 5 to a slot, if you’re feeling generous).

·         A Slot holds up to 250 coins.

·         Incidental items (ex. a base layer of clothes, jewelry, gems) do not occupy a slot unless carried in large quantities.

For characters who carry more Slots of stuff than they have available, I use a variant of 5e encumbrance. If you carry more stuff than you have available slots, you are encumbered, which means your speed is halved and you have disadvantage on any d20 roll using Strength or Dexterity. Carrying stuff occupying than twice the number of Slots you have overburdens you, which means you automatically fail those rolls and can’t move.

Furthermore, I also use a “silver standard” as described at Delta’s D&D Hotspot. Essentially, I take all treasure values listed in OSE/LL and either 1. divide them by 10 or 2. move them to the next-lowest denomination (ex. changing silver to copper). I convert currency as 1 gold = 10 silver = 100 copper. We count XP in terms of silver pieces acquired, not gold pieces.

This basically allows me to award the same “value” of treasure with much less physical space for player characters. Fifty gold coins in a silver standard gives them the same XP as 500 gold coins rules-as-written.

It creates a very different feel for the game, when finding a few gold pieces is a big deal. It’s a sort of “pulpy” thing I really like.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about encumbrance. I hope reading all of this wasn’t too much of a burden 😉