Errant Design Deep Dive #3: Items and Equipment

 For the duration of Errant's Kickstarter I will be doing a series of posts where I go through Errant, more or less in order, diving into the design of the game and its inspirations. To follow along, I suggest reading the relevant section being discussed at errantrpg.carrd.co. Also, we have a Discord server now.

Today is a look at the most sacred and profane cow of OSR play, inventory/equipment management. Today we'll be talking about Item Slots, Exhaustion, and Encumbrance, Weapons & Armour, Depletion & Supply, and Economy. Whew, that's a lot to cover. That's not all though: at the end is a special reveal of a new project in the works for Errant 

Item Slots, Exhaustion, and Encumbrance

What is there to say about item slots that hasn't been said before? They are the de facto  way of tracking inventory limits in most OSR and OSR-adjacent games now and the world is better for it. My first encounter with it was Matt Rundle's Anti-Hammerspace Item-Tracker way back when. For the longest time I made my players write down the location of every individual item in their inventory on their body, but I have now pared that down to just Hand & Handy slots and assume everything else is in a backpack. I also used to have some truly ridiculous fractional items floating around in my item lists; things taking up 1/3 or 1/7 or other dumb amounts. My players rebelled and I standardised to items either being 1 (or more) slots, 1/2 slot, 1/4 slot, or 1/8 slot. Recently after reading Anne's excellent posts on resource management I ditched the 1/8 slot.

I think once you have item slots its pretty intuitive to put other things other than items in them. I put in "exhaustion fills a slot" as a rule very soon after reading Knave, and its an approach that has recently seen much success in Mausritter; Errant doesn't go as full bore into using item slots for conditions as Mausritter does, but the idea of physical exhaustion "taking up" the space you could carry something else in feels fairly straightforward.

Encumbrance levels, as being separate from carrying capacity, was something I did not give very much thought to back in my days of playing the ultra-lights: you can carry this much stuff and do stuff, and if you carry more stuff you can't do stuff. I didn't see the need for granularity beyond that.

When I finally began to dive into the design of B/X though I began to see how so many of these little granular rules that many of the more minimalist takes on classic D&D pared away created the design space for so many of the classic gameplay experiences everyone in the OSR-sphere was talking about and that I wanted to access. Greater encumbrance means slower movement rates, which means you use more torches, and have more wandering monster checks to get across the same distance; you're more likely to have greater encumbrance coming out of a dungeon than you are coming in, since you're laden with treasure, but you're also likely to be bloodied and low on resources, meaning you're less capable of being in a fight if one occurs, and might not have enough torches to get you all the way through to the end. God forbid you have to run from a monster and ditch some of your treasure to be fast enough to get away in a chase. Having granular encumbrance levels rather than a binary "encumbered or not" creates multiple decision points, thereby enabling a wonderful economy of risk vs reward to be measured.

Of course the actual mechanics as written for doing so in those games have always been a little clunky, so my goal was to try and emulate that same interactions but with cleaner rules. In many ways I feel like Zzarchov Kowolski's description of Neoclassical Geek Revival as a "take on classic RPGs to the extent that none of the original mechanics survive" also sums up the ethos of Errant quite nicely.

The specifics of the encumbrance mechanics in Errant have changed many many times, notably because the rules around handling armour and calculating movement speed have had many changes and these three systems are fairly interconnected, but the two main things that its always done is: reduce movement speed (in combat) and increase event dice (in travel and exploration) if you're carrying more than your item slots, which I think ends up replicating the effects of its implementation in B/X and other editions but in a cleaner way.

Encumbrance also adds to the DV of certain physical checks like climbing or swimming, as well as checks for The Occult to see if they can retain their spells. This used to be a function that was related to armour, but it makes more sense to me as a function of encumbrance, especially since there's no weapon or armour restrictions for the Archetypes in Errant; magic users should always travel light and be dignified, carrying stuff is for patsies. 

While this might be kind of a harsh penalty for just carrying stuff (having a full inventory will increase the DV by 2, a full 10% less chance to do something), I will note that it can be largely obviated by just dropping your backpack and the things you're holding before you attempt something strenuous: this is a behaviour that I personally feel is so instinctual its automatic for me in my everyday life, but adventurers never worry about it. Personally I feel like this could lead to some interesting situations also where players are likely to get caught without a bag after shoving open a door and finding an angry group of critters on the other side, who they must now content with while their equipment is all strewn about all over the place.

Weapons & Armour

Armour is a doozy in terms of its design history in Errant; I'm not really sure where to begin. Armour, as I stated in an earlier post, was one of the first things I started futzing with back when this was still a Black Hack hack. Aside from just giving armour points (e.g. an ablative pool of damage reduction that decreased before hp did), I also kind of become obsessed with armour representing damage reduction and damage avoidance at the same time, so I had armour give a DV to attack rolls (back when there were attack rolls) equal to half the current amount of armour points, which meant that as you took damage and your AP decreased your AC decreased as well. On top of that, you took a quarter of your maximum total AP (not whatever your current AP was) and added it the DV for physical and spell retention checks. It was finnicky as hell.

When I ditched attack rolls I ditched the AC functionality and just kept armour as giving AP, though I was still keeping that ugly "quarter of max AP to physical checks" rule. 

I am not actually sure what prompted the switch from AP to the Blocks system that we have in place now. I think it was when I wanted to differentiate shields from other pieces of armour, and so I made them impair damage by a certain number of steps. From there I think I just realised armour was cooler, more active and engaging if you had to make a conscious decision to use it; it also provided a justification for the piecemeal armour system I was using, as blocks require narrative justification as to how you're blocking an attack with a particular piece of armour. I still had the very ugly "quarter of max Blocks to checks" rule for a little bit until I did away with it and replaced it with encumbrance quite recently.

I also like the way Blocks interact with the Quality rule: as you use more blocks to impair damage, an enemy rolling max damage becomes more likely (or inevitable if you reduce their damage to 1), which means that as you use your armour it is more likely to degrade.

Nick once asked me why I had weapons abstracted into 3 categories while I seemed to go into such careful and minute detail to individual pieces of armour. For one I like the piecemeal feel of individual armour pieces and what it does to the setting: you never buy a pristine shiny new suit of armour, your fucking boots wear out and your helmet breaks and you steal replacements from the body of the dude you just killed. My players were constantly finding random suits of armour or armour pieces and replacing their old ones and distributing them amongst themselves, ending up looking like little mismatched dolls wearing bric-a-brac assemblages of bloodstained armour.

The second is that, in my opinion, weapons have several orders of magnitude more complexity in all their myriad effects and applications, which is why I feel like its better to keep them more abstract. In situations like this, I feel like trying to specifically catalogue the differentiations between every type of weapon by tags or what nots actually decreases complexity instead of increasing it; keeping it abstract leaves a lot of room for player ingenuity and common sense reasoning from the guide to prevail. 

Dealing with plus bonuses to weapon was something I struggled with for a while; I run mostly published material so plus weapons show up a lot. Just keeping the flat increase to damage mathed out weird: a +2 dagger, which is a light weapon and thus has -1 damage, would do +1 damage. Plus I wasn't fond of the having to do any kind of addition, as a weird personal hang up. I played around with plus weapons enhancing damage by that many steps, but I realised that giving out enhancement as bonuses on things could skew things quickly because of how quickly they can add up, leading to a disproportionate advantage; plus, I like to save enhancement and impairment as rewards for players making clever use of tactics, planning, and their environment, not something they can just get without having to do anything.

I settled on plus weapons letting you maximize damage a set amount of times because again, I think active abilities are better than passive ones (both in terms of being more engaging and not having to constantly remember to add or do something), and because of the way it (along with the gambit mechanics, which we'll talk about soon) incentivize the asymmetrical nature of combat (Errants have piddly amounts of hp compared to monsters, and because of auto-damage will quickly be outmatched in a fair fight) to be about getting as many tactical advantages as possible, making your damage die as big as possible, and then using abilities like true strikes or combat dice to capitalize on your now huge damage die. From there it was just about giving armour a fairly equivalent effect.

Depletion & Supply

So, originally I had consumables like torches and rations on a usage die like they are in TBH. Even after I switched to using the Event Die system, I was still using usage die, treating rolls of 3, which called for light sources to burn, as a prompt to test the usage die. This was ultimately two layers of randomness, one of which was entirely unnecessary, as well as making consumables last forever. I instead gave them a depletion value which ticks down on a roll of the event die when it is called for. This had two added benefits: for light sources, I could use this depletion value to represent illumination, with how many ticks a light source had left representing how bright it was; second, I could give spells a depletion value to track how long they lasted as well.

The Supply idea is very obviously taken/inspired by Five Torches Deep, though The Wandering Gamist's critique of that system inspired me to make some changes to make it less disassociative:

1. Supply replenishes item on a slot to slot basis. That is, 4 supply take up a slot, and 4 supply is needed to replenish a 1 slot item; 2 supply for a 1/2 slot item, and 1 supply for a 1/4 slot item.

2. It's not tied to any attribute: you can buy supply so long as you have the money and so long as the local economy can handle it (we'll talk about that in a minute).

Two things I like about the supply system.

1. It smooths out the decision making process of item selection over the course of an adventure rather than frontloading it at the beginning. You still have to decide what specific items (torches, rations, potions, etc.) you're going to buy, as well as how much supply you want to bring on the trip, but during the adventure you're making moment to moment decisions prioritizing what's important: another quiver of arrows, or more food to eat. Coupled with restricted item slots, it forces constant evaluation and short and long term decision making over the course of an adventure: do I spend this supply to replenish something now, or save my supply but lose that item forever. A character can still choose to buy multiple quantities of an item that can be resupplied, of course to mitigate this a little, but that's still a choice that they're making and it comes with the drawback of losing the flexibility of supply.

2. It allows me to have a generic option for rolls of 3 (depletion) on the event dice in the situations where rations or light sources aren't pertinent for the adventure. I ran into the latter one quite often: "Ok, we rolled a 3 on the event dice, which means light sources burn, but you guys aren't using any cause this dungeon is lit so nothing happens." Nothing happens is the worst thing to say as a Guide; now I always have the failsafe of "ok, reduce your supply by 1."

Economy

The quality and breakage rules have remained largely unchanged since the earliest versions of the game: it used to be that quality decreased on your weapon on a crit fail attack, and quality decreased on your armour on a crit success attack against you. I've just changed that to be when you roll minimum damage and when someone rolls max damage against you. Besides creating another form of resource to track, it also, as a result of Errant's XP for waste rules also becomes a fairly decent source of XP at low levels.

(I will talk about the XP rules tomorrow but if you want to get the skinny check out this ancient twitter thread)

Regarding the point about it not sustaining a long term campaign, this has been my fix.
Players get 1 xp for every gp wasted, or for when something of theirs becomes unusable through threat.

— 𝖆𝖛𝖆 #𝖟𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖖𝖚𝖊𝖘𝖙 (@yungdumbitch) June 25, 2020

Settlement sizes were introduced in the game as part of the carousing rules in downtime, to determine how much money you could spend while carousing per downtime turn. Reading this post by Rick Stump, however, made me want to expand on the economic aspect of my game more, though I couldn't track it as intensely or granularly (nor would I want to) as Rick does because my game abstracts things like precise weights of items or being specific quantities of individual items like torches and rations (abstracting that mostly by supply).

Thankfully, having an abstract resource known as supply is very useful when trying to create a simplified system for simulating inflation, since supply is one half of the economic see-saw from which inflation arises. 

I like the inflation rules because it provides an associative limit to the amount of supply players can buy, it encourages players to travel to bigger settlements as they rise through the ranks (or make use of the infrastructure rules in the downtime section to increase the size of the settlement they're in over time). It also scales into the late game when trying to equip large expeditions to clear areas of wilderness.

Once settlement sizes and economy/price levels were integrated into the game, it was a short leap to also give items a rarity rating to determine what could be bought where; it was something I had planned to do a while for my home game, but fleshing out this system gave me an excuse to integrate it into the system.

Whew, that was a much longer post then these usually are. Thanks for sticking around (or scrolling) to the end. Here is your reward.

The GanHoggr Approacheth!

The Goose King squats in his great longhouse atop the barrows of his ancestors, feasting nightly on the most succulent turf, rich foreign wines, and the finest lettuces. In the swampy dark outside his kingdom burns and suffers. Supply for the King's swollen armies strip the land of fodder, leaving the meadows and pond untended bare and those who tend hungry. Raiders, beasts and brigands descend on the hall and hamlet, now unprotected due to the levy. 

Even the spiteful gods of the geesefolk have no patience for misrule and while their punishment is cruel it is also sure. 

The GanHoggr comes! 

The great gander of the Claymarshes, despoiler, land devourer, sword-blessed terror bird, maimer of champions, curse of the wrathful stars. The GanHoggr's scream again rips the night in contemptuous accusation, sounding the Goose King's failure, and the dawn of an age of ruin.

Gus L., inscrutable genius that he is, has decided to go even further from his original Goose King illustration and write a short adventure in the style of his recent releases like Star Spire or Broken Bastion for Errant. This is in addition to the free adventure module for backers that was unlocked as  a stretch goal as part of the Kickstarter campaign: Curse of the GansHoggr will be released as a free adventure for the whole entire internet.

And with that, I officially sign off!