Hey, this may be of interest to folks playing OSR games. I think Tom McGrenery will probably like this.

Hey, this may be of interest to folks playing OSR games. I think Tom McGrenery will probably like this.

Hey, this may be of interest to folks playing OSR games. I think Tom McGrenery will probably like this.

I’m loving Fear of a Black Dragon, and I’m dying to run Barrowmaze Complete.

To help enforce the resource management aspect of OSR games like B/X and LL, I made this simplified encumbrance system. Hope you like.

Feedback welcomed.

Originally shared by Eloy C

Simple? B/X Encumbrance system

Here is my attempt at an easy to use encumbrance system:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yY-IhJTowesIWRjMGaKo4APc374ytH8H?usp=sharing

I want to run an old-school dungeon crawl, The Barrowmaze, using B/X D&D. Given the nature of the module, I think keeping track of encumbrance is going to be vital to reinforce the resource management aspect of the old school play.

I was inspired by the Black Hack and by World of Warcraft, of course.

I tried to draw most of this from the B/X rules, with some help from AD&D 1e, and BECMI where there were gaps. I also looked at Labyrinth Lord. I experimented with the pregens on Barrowmaze and tried calculating their encumbrance in B/X, LL, BECMI and LotFP, and came up with similar values, so it’ll do for my purposes.

I think that if one were to print out the sheet, laminate it and mark it with erasable markers, it would be super useful at the table.

I’m not a graphic designer, obviously. If anyone wants to take a crack at a real sheet, that’d be nice.

Hope this is useful for someone else.

Thoughts?

10 thoughts on “Hey, this may be of interest to folks playing OSR games. I think Tom McGrenery will probably like this.”

  1. Thoughts on using this without supporting documentation:

    * start at the bottom, if you don’t have bags, you best be wearing or carrying anything you have.

    * no idea what that next line of stuff is, I’m going to say, here, have four to eight extra slots.

    * second to top line and top line, find your strength and mark off any higher boxes, you don’t get those.

    * you can put any small items in a half a square, large items require a full square, anything too big to fit inside a bag reasonably, takes up two or more adjacent squares.

  2. Thoughts on using this without supporting documentation:

    * start at the bottom, if you don’t have bags, you best be wearing or carrying anything you have.

    * no idea what that next line of stuff is, I’m going to say, here, have four to eight extra slots.

    * second to top line and top line, find your strength and mark off any higher boxes, you don’t get those.

    * you can put any small items in a half a square, large items require a full square, anything too big to fit inside a bag reasonably, takes up two or more adjacent squares.

  3. Ok I still don’t understand the speed things but I think it has something to do with getting slower and slower. I didn’t realize that armor would add to encumbrance. Not something I would include in my rules but I’m used to derivatives not B/X itself.

  4. Ok I still don’t understand the speed things but I think it has something to do with getting slower and slower. I didn’t realize that armor would add to encumbrance. Not something I would include in my rules but I’m used to derivatives not B/X itself.

  5. Yeah. According to B/X, the more weight you carry, the slower you move. Armor is possibly the biggest restriction (other than treasure )under that ruleset. Not only that, but 1600 coins is a hard limit. If you exceed that, you can no longer move.

  6. Yeah. According to B/X, the more weight you carry, the slower you move. Armor is possibly the biggest restriction (other than treasure )under that ruleset. Not only that, but 1600 coins is a hard limit. If you exceed that, you can no longer move.

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